...fly over me, evil angel...

Friday Fun Times

2012-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00

Young woman goes squishy over electric kitchen devices.

I apologise for the sound quality.

Rules Part 1

2012-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00

A Good Man Goes to War.

*claps hands*

Everybody ready? (Spoilers await, folks.)

Okay, Good Man is straight-up, cracked-out, full-on rock'n'roll Doctor Who -- I'm not sure how much caffeine Moffat pumped into his cast for this one but it is so totally absolutely worth it in every single possible way. It's such a frenetic rollercoaster of goodness, in fact, that it's kind of difficult to write anything about it.

I'm not even going to try to go over the story here. Suffice to say the big reveal is revealed: River is...well, River is River. She's also Amy and Rory's daughter but, really, you had ample time to figure that out during the season so it's not worth holding your breath through the whole episode waiting for it.

That said, the final reveal scene -- even without the reveal itself being a huge gasp-inducing moment -- is just...really really great. There's Amy and Rory and the Doctor and River and hugging and sexual innuendo and so much emotional energy passing between the characters that the screen practically crackles. It's just...sweet in the best possible way.

Other points of interest...

The good man. Clearly, as self-identified, the good man is not the Doctor: "Good men don't need rules. Now is not the time to find out why I have so many." Okay, good, I'll just be over here crouched in the corner whimpering gently, then.

This leaves us with relatively few options for the good man -- so, really, it's Rory. Which is kind of awesome because the show needs more Rory. Rory is coming from a relatively simple place: he wants to get his wife back and keep his family in one piece. It's not exactly a revolutionary goal in life but, given the events at the end of The Almost People, you can't blame him for being a bit tetchy: "Do I need to ask the question again?"

Rory has come such a long way from The Eleventh Hour -- and then, in a way, he hasn't. Rory has always been both observant and determined and, really, those qualities have only been enhanced by travelling with the Doctor, as the second half of the sixth season proves. He has a very handy knack of not being distracted by non-essentials: he sees the odd thing out or the thing that should be there and isn't and his habit of dogged insistence is extremely useful.

And the Doctor is not a good man in this; he doesn't even follow his own self-established rules, as Lady Vastra and Dorium Maldovar take a certain amount of pleasure in pointing out to him. The whole conversation with Colonel Manton ("Colonel RunAway") is just fucking terrifying; it's as close as the Doctor has come in quite awhile to losing it and it's so very very bad when he does that. And, of course, he gets bitten in the ass for it as Madame Kovarian waltzes off into the wild blue yonder with baby Melody quite neatly.

The secondary characters in this episode are fantastic, some of the best in the season: Jenny, Madame Vastra, Dorian, the Headless Monks, the Fat One, the Thin One, and Commander Strax. The baddies, particularly Madame Kovarian -- I wish I felt...better about. She's a little...uncentered. It's not clear why she's doing what she's doing or, even when Moffat tries to make it clear, it's still unclear what she gets out of it.

"What? What?!"

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

All right, before we start the investigation (see what I did there?) into the second season of Sherlock, let me lay something right out on the table.

I'm a Whovian.

In plainer English, I am a Doctor Who fangirl.

Bet you're surprised, right?

Yeah, no, I know you're not.

But my point is that, in the grand world of Steven Moffat's televisual projects, Sherlock can win, lose, or burn to the ground for all I care so long as Doctor Who stays solid.

My mantra since the end of Who season 5 has been "Don't fuck up season 6."

He didn't.

I'm happy.

That said, I like Sherlock. I heartily enjoyed the first season. I was looking forward to the second season.

And...well...Moffat didn't fuck up season 6.

And I can't say that Sherlock 2 is a total loss but....wow. After season 1? It's kinda sad.

The short version: Scandal = hot mess. Hounds = much stronger. Reichenbach = oh my fucking God is anyone paying attention here?!

Spoilers follow. RAYOR.

So, Scandal in Belgravia. I can't even begin to recap the story for you because, honestly, I'm sorta confused as to what happened. I think the actors were confused as to what happened. I'm damn near certain the writers were.

There was the pool. And then there was a phone. And some pictures. And a dead hiker. And a naked woman. And the phone again. And Mycroft being seriously bitchy for no good reason. And the phone again. And....yeah, I don't know.

Moffat. Gatiss. We all know you can do better than this. WTF, guys. Seriously. Pull your fingers out and do a third draft next time.

And if you ever ever write another female character as hampered, pointless, uneven, whiny, and generally useless as Irene Adler (who could have been so completely kickass I can't even stand to think about it), I will end you. Me, and every fangirl out here with a sense of self-respect.

Also? Moffat, stop ripping off your Who storylines for other things. Most of us watch both. Cribbing River Song to make a cod dominatrix version? Not. Cool.

(And while we're on that subject, I don't think you need to whap someone around with a riding crop after you've tranked them. One or the other. Not both. Both was just going for a forced 'sexy' moment that didn't work. If it had worked, I'd've forgiven you much. But it didn't. And if you'd realised it didn't and then let it drop, I'd've forgiven you. But you didn't. It didn't work -- and then you kept pushing it. Realise when the horse is dead, fellas.)

The best thing about Scandal is the few moments of Moriarty at the beginning. Oh, that, and John, Sherlock, and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson wins all the things in this -- as does Sherlock coming to her defense from the American (really, Moftiss? really?) thugs who break in to interrogate her. And Molly. Molly can share the things with Mrs. Hudson for finally stepping up for herself and telling Sherlock off -- much to the apparent amazement of everyone else in the room -- bar Lestrade, who was still trying to get over her dress.

I really cannot fully express my disappointment in this episode. It was a complete let-down after the tight, well-thought-out, detailed, character-rich storytelling that was the bulk of the first season to get this kind of sloppy rubbish that didn't seem to know where it was going, what it was doing, or what story it was trying to tell.

Anyway!

Something more fun on Wednesday. I promise.

Friday Fun Times

2012-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

Fucking awesome fanvid trailer for the Doctor Who 50th.

"Too Cute"

2012-01-11T08:06:00.000-05:00

Y'know what this week needs?

Kittens.

This week desperately needs more kittens.

Pro Bono Publico (Something Like That, Anyway...)

2012-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

Last week, I sent this .gif to a friend of mine.

To understand the rest of the post, I suggest you click through to it although it is NSFW unless you have a sheltered cubicle or an understanding boss. (It isn't someone dancing naked covered in chocolate, though; no naughty bits are revealed.)

The email dialogue between myself and friend ended like this:

Myself: i wonder if he went full monty...? why is he doing this?! did someone just yell 'hey, chris, take 'em off?'

Friend: From all accounts, that seems most likely. But I think the real question is not why he's doing it, but rather - why he's not doing it more often? Public good, and all.

Myself: maybe this should be pointed out to him...?

The conversation then took a slight left turn at this point into a discussion of what other people should do other things for the general public good.

Friend and I came up with the following list:

Chris Evans, strip.
Michael Fassbender, wear hats.
Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, just be awesome.
Jensen Ackles, smile more.
Joe Flanigan, just lean against the doorway there.
David Hewlett, snark at something.
Matt Smith, flail generally.
Karen Gillan, hug people.
Catherine Tate, laugh.
Paterson Joseph, just...lounge over there next to Joe.

I would also like to add:

James McAvoy, grin.
Maggie Smith, raise those devilish eyebrows of yours.
Arthur Darvill, tell stories.
John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, talk. About anything. Really. Recite your latest grocery list.

Enjoy this addition of pleasant ideas to your Monday! (Free of charge, too.)

Friday Fun Times

2012-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

You're welcome for the earworm. :)

And this is the movie they're talking about, by the way: Outlaw of Gor. I'm sure it's a classic somewhere.

Flesh

2012-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

So here's the deal. (RAYOR: mild spoiler-ish type things ahead.)

I really didn't enjoy either The Rebel Flesh or The Almost People that much. And despite having my DVDs of the first half of the season back in hand now -- and having had them for the best part of two months now, I think -- I really can't be bothered to watch them over again. I sort of have the same relationship with them as I did with The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood in season 5. Yes, they're good; yes, they have some interesting things to say; but they boiled such complicated, interesting conversations down into such Manichean dualities that I got very irritated.

This isn't to say that I wanted to use the discs for Flesh/People like Frisbees as I did for Earth/Blood. No, there wasn't anyone like Ambrose (*fists of rage*) in these episodes and I didn't want to kill anyone. I mostly felt sorry for everyone involved, particularly Jennifer who was so badly used by the whole storyline.

And then, of course, all sympathy gets diverted to Rory 'cause man does he get a rough deal. Just...really really awful.

But I'm a) not sure why this story had to be a two-parter; and b) not sure...well, I'm just generally not sure.

If the whole point of the 'ganger storyline is to convince us that gangers are people, too, then why does the Doctor dissolve the 'ganger Amy? It's no more her fault she's a 'ganger than it was...any of the other 'gangers! Why doesn't she get a chance to do her own thing like the others? If nothing else, wouldn't she be a valuable link back to whoever has the real Amy?

And what's with the 'gangers anyway? Are we supposed to cheer their political and personal emancipation? or worry that they're all going to turn out crazy huge blobs like Jennifer? And just...what...really was the point of all that?

Well, clearly, the point was to get us to the last ten minutes of The Almost People: that is, really, the only part of the show that advances the story arc at all.

Yes, there are some nice character moments outside of that -- Rory and 'ganger Jennifer; Amy and the 'ganger Doctor or the Doctor at all, really; the Doctor and Cleves -- but they're all rather brief and not enough to sustain the whole story.

And, yes, the thing with Jennifer-the-Blob at the end is...really quite unsettling. But I'm not sure it deserved to spark a conversation in the Guardian about whether Doctor Who was getting too scary for kids! After all, that's a conversation that's been going on since...oh, probably about...the end of December, 1963? and it's not very interesting. Mary Whitehouse proved just how uninteresting it could be!

Really, I feel that Flesh/People just kind of mark time to get you to the real meat of the season: A Good Man Goes to War.

"And this is how we begin..."

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000-05:00

And welcome to 2012, ladies and gentlemen and anyone else who might be hanging about the place.

Random thoughts follow...

Believe it or not, I do have a post in the works on The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People but I keep getting distracted by the fact that there are episodes after that that I want to talk about way more and have you all seen The God Complex? To say nothing of The Girl Who Waited! I mean, the hell!

Additionally, has anyone seen Tintin? Is it worth my braving a Peter Jackson movie for the sake of a Steven Moffat script?

In other news, I've finally finished the fourth season of Supernatural which was...very much like the rest of Supernatural, to be honest with you. I've come to the conclusion that the show is very much of a muchness but it's a muchness I very much enjoy, so I'm going with it. Dean snarks, Bobby growls, Sam pouts, Castiel scowls and they're all pretty madly attractive while they do it so what's not to like?

I also may have located a class -- or two -- that I can take via my workplace benefits this spring. You'd be amazed at the paucity of Harvard's history offerings. At least, I was amazed. Perhaps I am easily amazed? This, too, is possible.

Why does AMC always have to start their Walking Dead marathons with the beginning of season one at about noontime so that by the time they get to the season two episodes I need to get caught up on, it's about 9 o' clock at night? Is this fair? Some of us zombie-lovers have to get up early in the morning, y'know!

And, finally, is it fair that the latest Underworld movie is going to be in 3-D? Is it right and reasonable to deprive those of us who wear glasses of the fair Kate in tight leather?

Friday Fun Times

2011-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Most.Random.Thing.Ever.Or at least today.Or at least this half-hour.

Things That Make Me Happy and Should Come Here So I Can Hug Them

2011-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00

After Monday, it only seems fair.

1. Friends who make me gorgeous computer wallpapers. :)

2. Jensen Ackles' smile. Seriously. Between him, corvids, and Matt Smith, my cubicle at work is a lovely, lovely place.

3. Folks who take the time to put up full MST3K episodes on Youtube. (Not linking because, duh: I don't want anyone backtracked and shut down because of me. But, if you're curious, try Googling "MST3k the sword and the dragon" or "the day the earth froze" and pay attention to the usernames.)

4. John Sheppard/Rodney McKay slash. This is the fandom pairing made of endless bunnies and sunshine and rainbows and I'm not kidding. Want proof? Try this, or this, or, lord love you, this.

A visual representation of McShep slash.

Things That Irritate Me and Can Go Away Now

2011-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

Because it's my blog and I can.

1). The Christopher Hitchens love. I won't say I hated him and I'm glad he's dead. But I didn't like him very much and I sure as hell ain't cryin'.

2). The Ryan Gosling 'hey, girl' meme. What the fuck, people. All memes have a certain amount of annoyance built into them, but this is one of the only ones that makes me want to chew glass when I see it. It's not funny. It's not original. Try doing it with cats and maybe I'll want to kick you in the balls less.

3). Companions leave the Doctor, folks, it's how Doctor Who works. Why the news that Amy and Rory are leaving should cause such widespread angst and heartburn -- before they've even left! -- is a mystery to me. Particularly when no-one in the fandom seemed to give much of a shit when the Doctor mind-fucked Donna and left her to her fate. Yeah. Good one, 10.

4). In addition to the above: Amy hate. No. Just...fucking no.

There.

Thank you.

I feel better now.

In Which We Write Letters: Stop SOPA

2011-12-18T11:26:00.002-05:00

via

Anna here. This post is cross-posted at the feminist librarian.

Depending on your level of involvement in things internet-political and techy, you may or may not be aware of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) now making its way through congress. Introduced by representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), this bill mandates widespread monitoring of internet activity and has the potential to cause the internets as we know them to be fundamentally altered as blogs and other social networking sites are shut down for supposed acts "piracy." You can read more about the act at the Organization for Transformative Works, TechCrunch, and the American Library Association. The letter Hanna and I sent to our representatives is heavily cribbed from the ALA talking points.

Find your U.S. Representative here.

Find your U.S. Senators here.

18 December 2011

Dear Representative Capuano,

As librarians, bloggers, and registeredvoters in Allston, Massachusetts, we are writing to ask you to voteagainst the proposed Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261.

This bill, if it becomes law, willcause a widespread “chilling effect” on use of the Internet forcommerce, communication, and participation in democratic society. Thebill strikes at copyright protections currently granted to librariesand educational institutions by creating the possibility of criminalpersecution of institutions and institutional representatives. foronline streaming and other use of online resources in library andclassroom space. SOPA's requirements to monitor internet trafficviolate free speech and privacy protections and may create new formsof government surveillance of private activities within and outsidethe United States. The predicted consequences of SOPA arefar-reaching. If passed, the potential for new jobs, innovative newventures, and economic growth will be stifled.

Citizen engagement in online spacesdepends on the ability to share and discuss a wide variety of mediacontent across multiple social networking and other Internetplatforms. SOPA will effectively shut down the vibrant creativity andvital political discourse that has been made possible by the WorldWide Web. On behalf of ourselves, our online community of bloggers, and our library patrons, we ask you to vote against H.R. 3261, and supportalternative ways for protecting legitimate copyright interestsonline.

Sincerely,

Anna J. Cook & Hanna E. Clutterbuck

Friday Fun Times

2011-12-16T07:56:00.000-05:00

More Shaun!

Photo Wednesday: Christmas Tonttus

2011-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00

Hi folks, Anna here ...

This past weekend, Hanna and I were up in Maine celebrating an early Christmas with the folks. This involved a lot of good food, a Christmas carols service at nearby Colby College, and the creation of our very own tonttu for the apartment. Tonttu are Finnish house spirits that Hanna's mother learned about from her Finnish parents and grandparents. Here are some photographs that we took of the process of making two tonttus. It took the better part of Sunday morning.

these fellows were our model tonttus

here are some of the supplies Linda provided

We started with a base of cardboard, Styrofoam, and felt

all self-respecting tonttus need hats

Mine is on the left, Hanna's is on the right.

Hanna named hers Ibrahim; mine is named Helga

We brought them back to Boston on Monday to grace our Christmas shelf

While tonttu is the Finnish term for house spirits, some of you may be familiar with the Astrid Lindgren picturebooks which tell the story about a gentle tomten who cares for a family farm in Sweden. This is essentially the same folk character, though seen through the lens of a slightly different Scandinavian tradition.

I hope all of you are finding small and pleasurable ways of preparing for the holiday season ...

Travelling

2011-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm the one travelling not you.

Well, maybe you.

If you are, best of luck to you!

In any case, here's a video for Monday: one of my absolute favorite yoga routines from Kathryn Budig and Yoga Journal.

I'd say it's fine for anyone who's an adventurous beginner or beyond; you may want to have a strap or a block (or two) handy just in case.

Friday Fun Times

2011-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

Sheep and Doctor Who jokes. :)

For What It's Worth

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

It has recently been brought to my attention that some people actually take the recommendations and, presumably, the disrecommendations I make on this blog seriously.

I feel a sudden rush of power and blood to the head.

No -- wait, maybe that's just the third cup of coffee kicking in.

So with this in mind, here's my meaningless, completely insignificant recommendation for this week.

You enjoy raunchy, foulmouthed, violent cartoons, right?

Of course you do.

So I have three words for you, my friend:

Tripping the Rift.

All 3 seasons and the movie (not so great, but fun if you get into it and great if you've got a six-pack on hand) are available on Netflix insty and I'm betting that 5-10 minutes of hardcore Youtubing will probably net you the same thing.

Not for the faint of heart or the ready to blush since two of the main characters are Chode McBlob, the deeply profane and irreverent purple captain of Bob, an agoraphobic spaceship, and Six, Chode's feminist sex android.

Seriously, we are talking stripper jokes, sex jokes, drug jokes, alcohol jokes -- if you thought Little Britain was as bad as it gets -- well, okay, you were close but not close enough. There are also enough pop culture references -- visual and verbal -- to keep pretty much anyone happy.

The first episode is called "God is Our Pilot": Chode and his "faithful" android, Gus (think a limp-wristed-er version of Threepio) take a trip back in time and kill God. I mean -- what do you do for the rest of the day, right?

If you're in the mood to kick back and take nothing at all very seriously -- and enjoy a fictional universe where clowns are the evil villains we all know them to be -- then Rift is your new best friend, believe me.

Photo Monday: Athan's Bakery

2011-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

Anna here ...

Yesterday, Hanna and I branched out from out usual weekend haunts to try out a new spot for weekend brunch: Athan's Bakery in Washington Square, Brookline. It turned out to be a great place for people watching, reading (Hanna: Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Anna: The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin), and nursing our morning espresso. Here are some photos I snapped while we were there.

The front room, full of sunshine and sugary things.

Cookies sold by the pound

Not exactly breakfast food, but ...

There were lots of students with laptops working away

Hanna's left arm, lovely earrings, and
new-hairstyle-in-progress

Abandoned coffee cups at the espresso bar.

Friday Fun Times

2011-12-02T06:45:00.001-05:00

Rule Number One

2011-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

This isn't really about Rule Number One: either the Whovian or Pratchettian version.

I have, thanks to the grace of the BBC and Amazon.com, finished season 6 of Doctor Who. Yes, yes, let there be rejoicing in the streets and cheering throughout.

And I have thoughts -- plenty of 'em! -- on an episode-by-episode basis, but as I think about those posts and what I want to say, one thought from the season-as-a-whole perspective keeps returning to me in an absolutely irresistible fashion.

It's a message to Steven Moffat and the message is this:

Mr. Moffat.

Thank you. In all seriousness, thank you so much for what you have done for a show I have loved for many, many years. Between you and Russell T. Davies, you have done what I never seriously considered to be possible, so thank you.

However, having just watched season 6 -- good one with Gaiman, by the way -- I have one word for you and that word is this: midichlorions.

Google it if you have to or simply watch Star Wars: Phantom Menace.

I urge you to think.

Think very carefully.

Think very long and hard and for many many hours, or possibly days, before you explain what no-one in their right minds wants you to explain.

Thank you for your consideration.

So -- About Those Zombies

2011-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

So, I finished the first season of The Walking Dead in my mad "finish everything before Doctor Who arrives!" dash. (And I just caught the first couple episodes of season 2 on AMC during a marathon leading up to mid-season tonight.)

And I like Dead. I like it a lot. A lot a lot.

One of the things that really intrigues me about Dead so far is the strongly liberal/moral stance it has adopted and I nearly originally wrote that sentence as 'moral,' but that wouldn't be true because, well, morals aren't absolute no matter what the fundies might say and I think Dead has adopted a fairly liberal stance. True, they haven't come up against any dealbreakers yet, really: no gay zombies, or trans survivors, or anything like that. But a lot of horror, even very recent horror, takes a pretty conservative stance on things: sex is punishable by death; outsider status (unless heroified deliberately by the narrative) is punishable by death; etc., etc.

Dead seems to be defining some interesting new (or new-ish) territory outside of this rather routine horror storytelling. And this is quite apart from having characters who are adaptable, bright, quick to realise what's going on in the situation and I really have to reiterate my earlier point that I would like to kiss the actors and screenwriters all 'round for not making me live through an unending stream of 'But it can't be happening!' speeches 'cause I can't tell you how sick I am of that. My girlfriend can tell you of the long lectures I deliver to characters in horror movies instructing them to either snap to the truth of things and get a gun in hand or line up to be a hot dinner for whatever evil is on the rampage.

In any case, back to the point.

Dead seems to be lining up to take a slightly new view on things -- but it's being a little heavyhanded about it. You're a racist redneck? Better watch out: someone'll handcuff you to a pipe and (unintentionally) leave you for the eaters. Beating your wife recreationally? Watch out for the (sexually frustrated) sheriff's deputy with a chip on his shoulder -- then the zombies'll getcha, just to make sure the viewers get the point.

It's an interesting idea -- but already, even in season 1, I'm wishing they'd take it further -- and be a little more subtle about it. I don't think that the writers here are going to leave me high and dry the way the writers of Supernatural continually do: "Oh, here's an interesting---oh, shit! oh, shit! something controversial! Padalecki's acting skills can't cope! Retreat! Retreat!" (All said in a kind of quasi-Dalek voice, of course.) At least Dead is willing to talk about things like is suicide an acceptable alternative in this world? Okay, granted that it is, what about someone unconscious in a life or death situation (non-zombie related)? Okay, that's a bit blurrier so lets make it fun: what if it's a kid? What if someone does something really bad to get medical supplies so the kid can make it?

They're all interesting questions and I'm glad to see something genre that isn't backing away from them or cloaking them in so much symbolism and alien hoohah that they're unrecognizable to the naked eye or casual observer. That said, I'd also like some fairly basic storyline questions to be asked at this point: no-one seems all that concerned about infection, for example. Or where the zombies came from. Or where they're going. Or how they behave. Aren't these questions that a group hoping to survive for more than the next ten minutes should really be looking to?

Photo Monday

2011-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

Cat picspam!

Brains for Thought

2011-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

A couple quick thoughts for midweek -- well, more questions really...

1. Do the recent Halloween remakes/reboots/sequels have a hard time given that their progenitor film, made well over 20 years ago, helped set the rules for the modern slasher fic?

2. Is The Walking Dead deliberately setting out to be a moralistic zombie tale or is it just happening accidentally?

3. Do all SyFy Original movies suck or just most of them?

4. Does The Asylum really hate women?

5. And if it's going to be November, why can't it be the end of November so I can get my goldurned Doctor Who season six DVDs?!

Photo Monday

2011-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

More photos, folks -- I was hoping to have a post about The Walking Dead -- the first season of which I have nearly finished -- for today in honor of the season, but I have done something truly dreadful to my lower back which results in me being unable to sit and type for more than, oh, say 10 minutes at a time.

So wish me luck at the doctor's office tomorrow and maybe, if I'm a very lucky girl, I'll be able to write the post for Wednesday.

See, I think this was once a really sweet mother-and-child
statue...but check out Mommy dearest's hand.

Little 'n large tombstones.

Guess where? Hey, it's Halloween!

Spiffy fountain again.

Friday Fun Times

2011-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

I love the jumpiness in the cuts with the people holding the cards.

And if you'd like the (slightly more) lighthearted video with cards:

Plus the lead singer? Smoking hot. Kind of like a 3-way love child between Cillian Murphy, Colin Morgan, and Bradley James.

Random Post is Random

2011-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

So I don't know about the rest of you, but, for me, this is a week when I find myself trying to find Supernatural wallpaper with lots of pretty boys. (Also pace a con interview I saw with Jensen Ackles where he referenced feeling like a real idiot going in to do the publicity shot set-ups and then being like, "But wait -- I need more fans -- my hair isn't blowing enough!")

In light of that, here are some random thoughts for midweek.

1. The last episode of the latest season of Inspector Lewis drove me up a wall. If there was a way to put together more stereotypical Irish characters and a less-nuanced view of 20th century Irish history, I can't think of it. The only way would have been if a pedophile priest had turned out to be the killer. Up. A. Fucking. Wall. I'm tellin' you.

2. The most emo video in the world but, shameful reveal here: I adore this song.

3. Did you know Joss Whedon has just finished principle photography on a version of Much Ado About Nothing with Sean Maher and Nathan Fillion? True. Jury's still out on whether Fillion and Maher will be Beatrice and Benedick. Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease---

No, I don't know what's up with his hair either.

Photo Monday

2011-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

More pictures of...things!

They killed Kenny!
Sorry, I really am sorry... This is in Mt. Auburn, btw.

I have no idea. But I bet it would be a cool hang-out on
Halloween.

Spiffy fountain.

Ditto.

A last rose.

Friday Fun Times

2011-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

The world's briefest intro to Doctor Who....

And I got this from a SciFiWire story but the text surrounding it is as stupid as everything else SFW ever puts up, so I'm not linking to it.

The Endless Fascination of the Undead

2011-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

I realise I am, once again, behind the times, but I just got to checking out The Walking Dead.

First off, I have to admit myself humiliated that I recognized neither the sheriff himself (Andrew Lincoln) nor the lovely African-American (Afro-English, actually) gentleman (Lennie James) holed up with his son in the first episode without the assistance of IMDB. I really should be and am embarrassed. Of course, once I realised who the actor playing Grimes was, I had a hard time seeing him as hard-core bad-ass sheriff'y type. But I'm sure I'll get over that.

I have to say that the thing I really love about this show is how quiet it is. No moaning, no groaning, no stumbling, very little screaming, shrieking, or general freaking out. So far -- only a couple episodes in -- people mostly seem to be coping in a pretty reasonable fashion. After enough horror movies, you get really sick of the continual freak-outs; a couple of "Teen Screams" movies off Netflix will have you practically praying for someone who doesn't continually insist that what is happening clearly in front of his eyes isn't really real. (Not to mention blood that looks real.)

The hospital wake-up is very good -- I'm relieved I didn't have to see Andrew Garfield in the same state as I unwittingly saw Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later.

One of the reasons I kept wanting to see the show -- apart from the fantastic art hung in the windows of a couple local comic shops -- was I saw one of the comic covers that featured the "don't open / dead inside" door graffiti and I wondered if that was in the show. Turns out it is -- and it's awesome.

The zombie make-up is fucking fantastic and the extras must be having a blast: "Okay, what we want you to do is kind of wander around aimlessly and then bite people. And make it look good." Where do I sign up, please?! I'm sure more has been written about the Bicycle Girl in the first episode than I could ever cover, but I find both Grimes' original reaction to her and his later dispatching of her fascinating. The original encounter reveals both his practicality and clear thinking -- and how much the hope of finding his wife and son safely at home is sustaining him. He isn't really thinking all that clearly -- as his subsequent breakdown reveals, a large part of him is hoping that this is all a bad dream -- some sort of bad reaction to anesthetic or perhaps he's really just back in the coma.

His going back to find her is...interesting. I keep coming back to that as one of the more interesting points of the pilot. It's a pretty foolish way to spend your time, really. There are so many zombies about the place that if you see your new goal in life as "putting down the infected," you're totally set for the rest of your life. It seems fairly obvious that the show creators are setting up a parallel between Grimes who sets out to find this one individual and "put her out of her misery" or whatever it is he does and Morgan who also has a specific individual on his hands, so to speak, and can't bring himself to treat his wife as Grimes does the Bicycle Girl.

There's a pretty surface-level interpretation here: one can't kill the person one loves the best. But I think there's something more going on here: in the middle of all the ghastliness of his first couple days awake in the new world, Grimes remembers the Bicycle Girl, tracks her down, and doesn't simply blow the back of her head off, but talks to her, tries to get something back from her -- before, of course, blowing the back of her head off. The one-sided conversation he has, even with a zombie who is clearly dying of starvation in front of his eyes, is fascinating as Grimes tries to make sense of what's happening in front of him and come to terms with it in some way.

Morgan, on the other hand, has had longer and more horrible circumstances under which to come to terms with what's going on. He knows exactly -- or as exactly as any of our character can know at this point -- what's going on and that his wife will never come back. At best, he can hope that she wanders away and is lost in the undead hordes; at worst, her persistence at the door will be rewarded and she will kill him and their son -- or doom them to wander as undead with her. Either way, their family is over: as the man said, "There ain't no comin' back." He's prepared, he knows what he has to do, even his son understands in the end and hides without trying to stop him -- and he can't do it in the end.

What this means in the long run for the two characters I have no idea. I don't even know if Morgan shows up with any regularity after the first episode. But I'm eagerly anticipating going through the rest of the season and finding out.

Photo Monday

2011-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

...and more to come later in the week. Not just photos, other stuff, too.

I just started watching The Walking Dead and whoo-boy! Is that a fun time or what!

This is Shirley the Sheep at my mom's fiber arts table at a recent
show in Boothbay.

Geraldine testing out new rag rugs. The foot is Anna's.

Mt. Auburn cemetary.

Ditto.

Playing with settings on the camera...

Mushrooms or possibly pancakes. :)

Announcement!

2011-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, the exclamation point makes this look way more exciting than it is.

I'm going to be taking a brief blogging hiatus for the rest of this week and all of next. Return on the 17th for fun and frolics!

(No, please. Really. I'll miss you if you're gone.)

And if you just miss me too much during the hiatus, check out the evil angel tumblr (for a fairly random mix of stuff) and the everything is gay and nothing hurts tumblr (for an ever-increasing amount of slash fic.) if you really can't stand the pain, you can come visit me on archive of our own (a.k.a, ao3) as Crowgirl.

Photo Monday: Maine and Back

2011-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

This post brought to you by Anna.

This passed Saturday, Hanna and I drove up to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens to visit with her mom and dad. Linda was exhibiting at the Maine Fiber Arts Showcase. It was a rainy afternoon, but luckily the fiber arts event was inside the visitor's center.

As usually happens when we visit with Hanna's parents, we drove north with things to give/return to them and they met us with more things for us to take south again ... a new sweater for Hanna, the tam that Linda knit me for Christmas and finally blocked, and what Hanna has termed "the rudest thing ever":

Kevin with the rude squash (photo by Linda)

In exchange, we finally allowed Shirley -- the stuffed sheep from Michigan that we gave Linda for her birthday in July -- to move to her forever home in Maine.

Shirley and Linda at Linda's display booth (photo by Anna)

The garden is impressive in size and scope, although we didn't get a chance to see much of it in the rain. One section is the fairy house village. I think this is where these magical creations were headed:

fairy houses in the garden library (photo by Anna)

a fairy castle? tree house? (photo by Anna)

Shirley got a bit chilled (photo by Anna)

When we got home, Geraldine was pissy because we had left her alone all Saturday -- but she was somewhat mollified by the four new rag rugs we brought home, courtesy of Linda. Rag rugs are clearly for kitties to sleep on, not for humans to place their feet.

enigmatic cat is enigmatic (photo by Hanna)

Monday again, huh?

2011-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

Anne Lamott, in her great Bird by Bird once describes the first day of the week as "your mute, Slavic uncle Monday." She suggests not starting big things -- no new novels; no screen plays; no house cleaning projects -- on Mondays 'cause, dude...uncle Monday.

And so that's how Monday is personified for me a lot of the time: an out-of-proportionally big guy, in an overcoat that doesn't fit, and huge clown shoes. Except all in a kind of rusty, grungy black. Shaggy dark hair, and no use for language.

In order to give uncle Monday a little run for his money, lets look at pretty things instead, shall we?

My two favorite new Tumblr blogs are all about the pretty things. Lets give some love to "You only lose what you cling to" and brown dress with white dots. These are both primarily photo blogs; the former is colloquially known as "fuckyeah cats lesbians and buddhism" -- just so you know what you're getting into: some of it may be NSFW, but the photography is wonderful.

brown dress is my new favorite photo blog at this point; sometimes the stuff going up can seem a little...posed and slightly artificial to my eye -- my totally untrained, amateur photographer's eye, by the way -- but then there's shots like this and this and this .... oh, and this.

So go forth and look at pretty things and maybe mute old uncle Monday will come and chill out with you for a bit and think about cats rather than glooming in the corner and thinking about cockroaches.

Friday Fun Times

2011-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

Following through on last week...don't blame me if this gets stuck in your head for hours! I can still sing most of this -- as well as most of the opening of Act 1, all parts -- from memory; how sad am I?

Oh, and I suppose this is probably mildly NSFW if you care about that sort of thing!

Rant: SW Fans, STFU

2011-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

My parents and I have watched a lot of very bad movies. And when I say "a lot," I mean a lot: we must be past dozens and into the low hundreds. Movies so bad that they kind of paralyze you into watching them -- you know the ones I mean. Where you finish it and turn to the other people in the room as the final credits roll blissfully past and say, "Why did we watch that?" Movies like Quigley Down Under and Species and Twister. Okay, maybe not Twister for which I have a sneaking fondness based largely on Bill Paxton and the nifty-shit aunt who gets her house destroyed by the F4 or whatever the fuck it is.

Anyway, my point is: I watched a lot of bad movies with my folks when I was living at home. And I've watched a lot of bad movies since -- sometimes, I search out bad movies: movies with disappointing CGI, poor casting decisions, bad use of documentary footage, or movies that are simply a bad idea. Some of these movies turn out to be joyous little slices of deliciousness as in the wonder that is Shark Attack in the Mediterranean, a German attempt at Jaws dubbed into English which takes place in what may or may not be Majorca and the climax of which features Ski-Doo racers being stalked by a genetically recreated Megalodon with the accompanying soundtrack of a cheery little pop-song that I swear to God is unironically and with no apparent attempt at family-unfriendliness or sarcasm called "Do the Sixty-Nine." Sheer glory, I tell you.

Over the years, though, my parents and I have learned that there's this great thing on the remote to help you deal with bad movies: it's called the "stop" button or the "power off" button. It really works like a charm -- and I want all the Star Wars fans currently bitching about the Blu-Ray release of the movies to learn the fuck about it.

Don't like it? Don't freakin' watch it.

There's an "off" button, people -- better yet, keep your damned credit card in your wallet and don't shell out in the first place! It's not like Lucas isn't a multi-zillionaire nine times over at this point; I don't think he's hurting for your $59.95 or however much the Blu-Ray set costs. I myself own the original trilogy in two different formats at least 3 times over, the new trilogy -- I think only once. I'm happy with the edits I own: I was happy when Lucas brought out the original edits of the first trilogy on DVD; I bought the box set; and I stick with it. I have the circa 1998 edits, too, because I happen to like a lot of the changes he made to Empire.

And while we're on the subject, please, for the love of heaven, stop going on about how Lucas is ruining his own story. It's his story, folks, his. Not mine, not yours, not anyone else's. Okay, it's moderately Joseph Campbell's, but we'll let that slide since he didn't seem to mind. And I hate to tell you: but as long as that copyright is in Lucas' beflannelled little hands, he gets to do what the fuck he wants with it and maybe, just maybe, at this point, we could all just shut the fuck up about it. The man is a compulsive re-editor; we're just going to have to live with that. Yeah, he does shit we think is stupid; who doesn't, really?

And on the whole, I am still far more grateful to him for putting the story out there in the first place than I am niggly about different audio cues or actors edited in to places they shouldn't be.

Photo Monday: BU Bridge

2011-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Hi! Anna here.

Last Friday, Hanna and I walked from our apartment over to Cambridge via the Boston University bridge which has been under extensive restoration for the past several years. It was a gorgeous September day. Here are a few photographs that we snapped on the bridge.

Hanna looking west up the Charles river
(photo by Anna, obviously)

Moon over I-90 (photo by Hanna)

graffiti on the freight rail bridge below
(photo by Hanna)

girders in the sun
(photo by Anna)

Cross-posted at the feminist librarian.

2011-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

I'm glad to say that I have totally reclaimed my love of RENT after many years of trying.

To celebrate this fact, enjoy one of the (very very) few undramatic, simply enjoyable songs:

2011-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

So, really, I suppose this should be a Friday thing but y'know what? It's shaping up to be kind of a rough week, I don't have a lot of time to put a more complicated post together... and, honestly, I think we all need this.

Don't you think we need this?

And here's how they did it.

Thanks to Diana for pointing this out to me when my normal news sources were sadly remiss. :)

Announcement: Launching Fan Fiction Tumblr Today

2011-09-12T09:58:00.003-04:00

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

(Anna here)

I look at this as the (nearly) inevitable result when you take two librarians + a galloping fan fiction addiction + the internets and stir: Hanna and I, in search of a way to share our favorite fan fiction with friends who have a similar taste in leisure reading (and occasionally writing), have established a Tumblr blog for collecting and sharing fan-created fiction.

everything-gay-nothing-hurts.tumblr.com

It's multi-fandom -- though our current obsession is with Supernatural's Dean/Castiel -- and we've enlisted the assistance of two pals (MH and R) to help us broaden our fandom scope. Our plan is to post a fic recommendation Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So if fic is your thing, please wander on over and subscribe!

~Anna & Hanna

Friday Fun Times

2011-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, you have absolutely no idea how many times I heard the opening notes of this song while searching down this video for you. But it was worth it, my friends -- so worth it.

Enjoy the charmingly unselfconscious Jensen Ackles. And have a great Friday while you're at it.

2011-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Since I kind of think of it as "Whovian Wednesdays" around here -- although, obviously, I would never title anything that because, God, what kind of person do you think I am? -- here is something Whovian for your mid-week.

Also, I can't face thinking about The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People just now and I really do have to watch the episodes again to refresh a few details before I wibble on about them.

Normally I wouldn't link to io9 because I don't like the site that much but I can't resist the breakdown of 10 Totally Different TV Shows That Doctor Who Has Been Over the Years.

dr_who_who by the-quick-brown-fox.

Photo Monday: Uneasy Detante

2011-09-05T11:42:00.000-04:00

This is life in our household today. Hope yours is a relaxing!

Geraldine attempts to commune with
Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg

~Anna and Hanna, Labor Day 2011

Friday Fun Times

2011-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Who can choose just one Linkin Park video?

"Thief!"

2011-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Post-facto edit: So I have had an incredible amount of trouble writing this post. I've been working on it on-and-off for three weeks now and I'm just going to throw it out there. Know before you read that it may not make that much sense and I know I'm missing huge huge huge things. Sorry 'bout that. Blame it on the medication if you like; I do.

I'm going to admit it right up front: The Doctor's Wife would have had to bork loudly and badly in about 9,000 different ways at once before I didn't love it. I went into it not only wanting to be pleased but feeling more than a little bit confident that I would be pleased.

'Cause -- did you notice the writing credit at all? Yeah, this dude, right here. And since I've pretty much enjoyed everything he's ever written -- with the exception of Sandman but that isn't Gaiman's fault; that's my ex's fault -- I was pretty much right there with Wife from the beginning. (Okay, if you don't know who Neil Gaiman is, that last paragraph makes next to no sense. Still, if you don't know who he is, you have a lot of treat coming your way! I suggest starting either with Stardust or Neverwhere but, really, just pick a title that grabs your eye and go with it. Enjoy. There are also great movie/TV adaptations of both of the above, just in case that helps you out at at all. Obviously -- read the book first. :))

But then -- you know what the bonus to all this was? It was fucking awesome. It didn't need help to be loved because it was freakin' great. (My real problem with it? The sound on my DVD was not great -- we had to ramp up the volume to a little over half and still had problems.)

Read on at your own risk of spoilers.

Plus, I have a slight shame issue: I failed to recognize the voice of Michael Sheen. Whoopsy!

The basic story for Wife is very simple (as with a lot of Gaiman's best short stories): the Doctor is decoyed to an asteroid, thinking he has received a message from an old Time Lord friend in peril. Meanwhile, an Ood removes mind and soul from a young woman named Idris as she is assured by an older woman she calls Auntie that everything will be fine because there will be a Time Lord along shortly. The Doctor, Amy and Rory in tow, arrives and -- well, everything really isn't fine. Gaiman begins to ring the creepy changes as soon as the Doctor sets foot on the asteroid -- earlier, if you notice that Auntie, her companion Uncle, and the Ood, Nephew, don't seem...hooked up right. Idris herself has been acting strangely since the TARDIS arrived and her first scene with the Doctor is just great: "I just thought of a new thing about kissing!"

Idris is a delightful, sad, heartbreaking new character -- mostly because you never really know what Idris herself is like. The original Idris is gone in the first few moments of the show. Who knows what the real Idris was like! But the TARDIS in human form? As Amy asks the Doctor: "Did you wish really hard?" I know it's become a truism for the new series for fans to say that the true love of the Doctor's lives is the TARDIS but, seriously, folks? It's true. And seeing that made more visible for the rest of us -- well, I normally want to give Gaiman hugs but now I want to hug him, his kids, his dogs, his assistant, and his wife. Just for the sake of having been somewhere around the creation of this fantastic conceit of the TARDIS embodied.

Watching the TARDIS-as-woman and the Doctor interact is wonderful, particularly since Idris is such a delight: she's sharp, funny, and gives the Doctor shit. And her take on their relationship is great stuff: "I wanted to see the universe so I stole a Time Lord and ran away." !! Yes, please! (It's also wonderful that she continually refers to the Doctor as "her thief.")

Alongside all this lovely, however, is a good dose of both sad and genuinely scary: House, the living asteroid who has been...well, up to no good, steals the TARDIS (minus the energy that is now in Idris' body) and makes a run for it with Rory and Amy trapped inside. The mind games House puts them through are really quite uncomfy making -- time becomes a suddenly flexible thing and Amy, for the first time really, is faced with Rory getting angry at her for abandoning him: "You left me again!" The graffiti scrawled on the TARDIS walls as Rory ages and dies without Amy is terrifying. It brings back unpleasant memories of Day of the Moon with the marker slashes on everyone's skin to mark encounters with the Silence.

The Doctor's temper, too, is volatile in this episode: when he discovers what House has been up to, we see shadows of the scene in Eleventh Hour where he calls the Atraxi back for a scolding: the Doctor is always distressing to be around when he gives into his urge to deliver the universe a righteous smackdown.

But the centrepiece of the episode and what makes it an absolute gem is the Doctor and Idris: it's heartbreaking, hysterically funny, charming, lovable -- and I can pretty much guarantee you will never watch The Big Bang the same way again.

photo monday: home improvement

2011-08-29T00:00:00.004-04:00

Anna here, in charge of Photo Monday for the week!

In the midst of Hurricane Irene this week, Hanna and I not only managed a trip to visit friends in Providence, RI, but also built some shelving for the bedroom in order to better organize books and clothes ... the dressers we'd saved from the apartment building trash (yes, we have been known to dumpster dive) and the wine crates from the store up the street just weren't cutting it any longer. The downside, of course, is that we had to spend yesterday evening constructing a 9' x 7.5'x 1' shelving unit in our tiny apartment. In tropical humidity.

Ah, the price of literacy.

First, we had to clear a space for the new shelves.
(If only we could keep the wall empty! So restful.)

We moved one of the old bookcases into the closet to hold VHS tapes
and periodicals. Play spot the cat for extra points!

There were 72 bolts to tighten. Ouch!
Gerry supervised from her perch on the piles of books.

By 10pm we had the whole thing constructed and
called it quits for the night.

Here are the shelves mostly filled (the wine crates remained ... but our
clothes are finally not buried at the back of the closet!

The cat's supervisory responsibilities exhausted her.

And now we have space for more books!

This time we've actually interfiled our books
for subject continuity!

And now as I type this, Hanna is making us Tassajara whole wheat millet bread which is one of my new favorite treats! I promise a recipe one of these days. We plan to enjoy it with Magic Hat Hex and matzo-vegetable soup.

Cross-posted at the feminist librarian.

Friday Fun Times

2011-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

On some level, I really do believe there is nothing better than this song some days.

Thoughts for the Soon-to-be-Fan

2011-08-24T00:00:00.001-04:00

This is a rebroadcast of a post I originally wrote for the Pursuit of Harpyness. If you've already read it there, apologies; come back on Friday for something more original! (Okay, it probably won't be technically "original," but it will be different.) And I'll try to get my act in gear re: The Doctor's Wife for next week, I swear.

When Anna originally asked me if I would be interested in doing some guestblogging on what I call "the orange blog," she suggested that I could think about writing about Doctor Who companions -- possibly from the original series -- and why they are awesome. This is largely because I spent a lot of time complaining about the bloggers who complained about the length of Amy Pond's skirt. (Short version: who cares about the length of her fracking skirt? If you're staring at her legs, you are totally missing the point. End short version.)

I considered this, but then another friend -- the wonderful Lola -- suggested in an email that a primer for those baffled but intrigued by the Doctor Who universe and fandom might be a good idea. And before I could plan, really, I was already suggesting "rules" and a collection of episodes to Anna via chat. What follows has been cleaned up and expanded, but still.

For those who don't know the series, welcome! The TARDIS has lots of space; find a seat and hang on. For those who do -- well, I hope what follows is at least a little bit funny.

1. It's bigger on the inside.

2. Never lose faith in the sonic screwdriver. And prepare to be charmed by its regenerative capacities. From originally looking like a tire pressure gauge, it now looks like some kind of whacky mini-LCD flashlight crossed with a tire pressure gauge. And it goes "chirp" a lot. Enjoy this.

3. Time Lords. Time Lords are...a real bitch, honestly. In the original series -- 1963-1989 inclusive bar a couple of BBC worker strikes in the '70s and '80s -- the Time Lords were, more or less, supposed to be the magical deus ex machina good guys. The Doctor (no spoilers here) is a Time Lord -- if he is awesome, then shouldn't his planet be just overflowing with awesomeness? Well, yes, and no. If you look closely at the original series Time Lords (I'm thinking here of things like the last part of of the Patrick Troughton episode War Games where the Time Lords force the Doctor to regenerate and exile him to Earth and the first several season of Jon Pertwee's Doctor where he's dealing with the exile and, by the way, having had bits of his memory tampered with also by the Time Lords) they're not so sweet and kindly. They're actually pretty devious, rather self-centered, and capable of being quite cruel. The Doctor makes more than one reference (The Deadly Assassin, The Five Doctors) to the Time Lords' history and how it "ain't all lavendar." In the new series, head writer Russell T. Davies and, in his turn, current show-runner Steven Moffat, have taken that idea and run further and faster with it than I think anyone expected them to. If you're an old series fan (like me) who always secretly thought the Time Lords were probably on crack, The End of Time (the last of the David Tennant specials) will warm the twisted cockles of your heart. If you're a totally new fan, enjoy the cracktasticness of having illusions destroyed.

4. Anything being in the TARDIS other than the Doctor, companion(s), and specifically invited guests is bad. Any sounds, any voices, faces -- if there's an actual physical person, then whoa. If you hear a deep bell tolling (see Cloister Bell) prepare for the deep and sticky 'cause it's gonna get bad in here.

Fifth Doctor.
(Peter Davison.) Note celery.

5. There have been 10 other regenerations of the Doctor. If you don't like this one, there are plenty of others to choose from! but, please: leave others to their enjoyment. Almost every fan has a particular regeneration of the Doctor they consider to be "theirs." It's often the first Doctor you encounter but doesn't have to be (hey, it's a fandom: there are no real rules here!) If you love Peter Davison (5), that's awesome; I'd love to listen to you enthuse for hours on why celery is the greatest thing ever; but, please, don't knock Matt Smith (11) for not being David Tennant (10). And so on and so forth.

6. That being said, the Doctor is, in essence, always the Doctor.

7. The Daleks are small irritable pepper-pots who want to rule the universe. Their history with the Doctor goes back to the second episode of the first season of the series; more about this in a later post. Give thanks to the estate of the late, great Terry Nation who created them that Davies and Moffat get to play with them. They will always come back. They will always be short-tempered. They will always want to rule the universe and/or kill the Doctor. It's just what they do.

8. Sontarans look like pissy potatoes. If you were the genetically modified member of a clone society entirely based on military conquest and domination, you'd be easily annoyed, too.

9. Yes, you can escape the entire Cyber empire on foot, at a gentle stroll. Don't let them concern you unduly.

10. The Master. Just -- remember that name. It will be important and when you need to know why -- you'll know why.

The Master. (John Simm).

11. Okay, here's why: the Master is, along with the Daleks, the Cybers, and the Sontarans, one of the longest-running and most popular villains on the show. He has been through at least two official regenerations (I'm counting Roger Delagado, Anthony Ainley, and John Simm here although there are eight actors who have played the part one way and another) but more bodies than that and is, as Time Lords go, so far at the end of his regeneration rope (having started in the show at 12 back in the day with Jon Pertwee and the Third Doctor), that his rope has given up and gone home (see point 14). He makes up what he no longer has in regenerations through body-stealing and black magic.

12. The Time War. Think of it as Event Zero (for the new series) and almost completely irrelevant (for the old series). To know more, watch David Tennant (10), season 2-4 of the new series. And then, when you understand it, come back and explain it to me.

13. Companions. Used to be called 'assistants' back in the '60s and '70s. Often, though not always, a young woman; often, though not always, a single person travelling with the Doctor, sometimes for multiple series. Serves the function of the audience: asks the question to advance the plot; gets lost/poisoned/captured/hypnotised/drugged; goes and opens the door with "Do Not Open" on it; wanders into places which should not be wandered into; and, in the new series more than the old to my mind, keeps the Doctor a little more in the light than he might otherwise be. Classic companions from the original series include Susan, Jamie, Zoe, the Brigadier, Jo Grant, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, Romanadvoratnalundar, Sergeant Benton, Adric, and Ace. (If you want to discuss the politics of skirt length, do it somewhere else.)

14. Regeneration. Time Lords -- of which the Doctor is occasionally not the last; see point 3 -- get to regenerate when a body is old, worn-out, or too badly injured. They get 12 regenerations. This is old series canon. Steven Moffat may (or may not) be on a road to reinvent this from the ground up.

15. Hey, I came up with 14; I figure y'all get to do some work here, too: what's your 15? If you're a fan, what's the thing you tell your friends when you're trying to get them hooked?

Pretty Things

2011-08-22T00:00:00.001-04:00

What do we all need on a daily basis? Yeah, yeah, apart from the whole "food, water, air" triad. Well, one of my yoga teachers (via DVD only, sadly, but that still counts, right?) says, "Space" which is as good a suggestion as any. A bumper sticker on my kitchen wall says, "Chocolate" which is an excellent answer most days. "Whatever the hell gets you out of bed" also works -- unless it's an illegal substance or something which contravenes someone else's human rights.

But one of the things I think we all need more of are pretty things to look at! Who doesn't need something lovely to look at while cubicling the day away? (And I say this as someone who really kinda likes her cubicle.)

So here is a selection of "Pretty Thing Providers" -- i.e., Tumblrs.

WhoQuotes. It's kinda all in the name here, folks, but you get a great assortment of quotes (Whovian, of course) and images on here.

I love classic horror/sci-fi images. And the Swamp Thingy blog meets that craving beautifully; great combo of animated and static images and lots of other fun blogs to find if you enjoy link-surfing (and who doesn't?) It's like a daily Godzilla quotient!

Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. The Lazy Book Reviewer is neither lazy nor self-indulgent but she does give you some of the funniest, sharpest, most amusing Tumblr commentary you're likely to get: on books, TV, movies, and her dog.

book lovers never go to bed alone. Bookshelf pron. Book pron. Bookstore pron. Are you literate? Do you have a thing for books? Then this is for you. You may wish to put something over your keyboard before you start looking at the images; drool can short out your keys, y'know.

fuck yeah dr who -- while I may not agree with their spelling (I prefer "Doctor" to "Dr."), I love what they do! Old series; new series; it's all here.

Friday Fun Times

2011-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Hey, I owe you something cheerful after Wednesday, right?

So here it is: cheerful and terrible at once! (But not terrible in the classic sense of the word.)

Oh, Doctor

2011-08-17T00:00:00.001-04:00

This week hasn't worked out quite like I planned, but this is something Whovian! And it's Wednesday!

Take this next bit seriously, though: if you haven't seen the end of the first half of Season 6 yet, do not watch this.

I cannot stress this enough.

Really. Do not hit play.

Photo Monday

2011-08-15T00:00:00.002-04:00

You know what I really hate about being depressed? How things I used to enjoy doing now seem like terrifying abysses of doom, humiliation, and despair. After spending most of last week dealing with a hellacious commenter on the orange blog (did you know I'm guest-blogging there for August with Minerva and Lola? I am! One of my posts is cross-posted from here, so you've seen it already, but here's the newbie!) who tried her best to hand my ass to me, writing new posts is somehow not on my Top 10 list of things to do this weekend.

And yet here I am and I have so many thoughts about The Doctor's Wife that we'll see what we can come up with by way of something Whovian for Wednesday.

Anyway, with that note on your Monday morning, enjoy some old photographs that I didn't put up at the time I took them but still really like. And I really do honestly hope you are having an awesome start to your week -- or finish to your week if you are one of those individuals who work over a weekend or night shifts or third shifts or weird stuff like that. Good on you.

The strange damage being done by something to my
beloved philodendron, Ianto.

Trees near the Saugatuck Dunes.

A panorama shot I got nearly right! (Also Saugatuck.)

Ditto. Not about the panorama bit, obviously.

Lakeshore sand.

Geraldine in what was one of her favorite napping places
last winter: the basket we kept our napkins in.

One of last winter's blizzards.

Ditto.

Friday Fun Times

2011-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

More Dar Williams. Hell of a way to spend 5 minutes on a Friday, in my opinion!

Which Captain Jack Would Be Relevant Here?

2011-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Here we are today to talk about the pirate episode of season 6. I know, I know: it has a real name. Black Spot something-or-other. But, honestly -- are we ever going to call it anything other than "the pirate episode"? No, we are not. So lets just start as we mean to go on and leave it there.

But first: a public service announcement from the end of A Good Man Goes to War: WHAT THE FUCK! SERIOUSLY. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK WAS THAT ABOUT.

Ahem.

Moving on. Spoilers, yada yada.

The Curse of the Black Spot. (I did say it had a real title.) Overall, this has much the same feel as, for instance, Victory of the Daleks. It's a fun, charming monster-of-the-week that tries to do something a little more serious at the end and, depending on how much you liked the rest of the episode, succeeds or fails accordingly.

I have heard people complaining about this episode because it's not like the season openers were. To sidetrack for a minute and be fully honest, I don't really read the Tor.com posts about Doctor Who (the first link) because I don't like their DW bloggers. They seem to me to be all new series fans who expect the show to be something that, in its DNA, it isn't. But that's a post for another day. (If nothing else, the episode Teresa Jusino talks about in her post, The Web Planet, is one of my favorite Hartnell episodes. I love the bugs; I love the planet; I love Ian. So bite me, Ms. Jusino: if your taste is for the adrenalin-driven and simplistic, I suggest you try Supernatural or Battlestar Galactica. Or, say, The Hills. And get the hell out of my party.)

Ahem. *kofkof* Sorry about that: bad fan moment. I get no cookies. Go your ways, Ms. Jusino: I'm sure there's room enough in the TARDIS for all of us.

Anyway, no, Black Spot is not the most exciting episode that the first half of season 6 has to offer: it is a fun way to spend 45 minutes. The TARDIS lands on a pirate ship that is being haunted by a siren who claims anyone who is injured or sick on the ship; even a minor cut is enough for her to turn up and whisk off the luckless sailor to -- heaven knows where. Or the Doctor knows where. There's also a grumpy captain and a mysterious stowaway.

Arthur Darville gets to have a marvelous time in this episode doing a cod version of Alan Tudyk's fantabulous stoned turn in Death at a Funeral. Rory is injured fairly early on in the episode and the siren keeps trying to take him away; Amy and the Doctor basically sit on him, but his behavior when the siren around is a hoot.

Turns out the siren can enter the ship -- to claim the aforementioned injured victims -- not simply through the water around or on the ship but through any reflections. It may be that all reflections are now open doors from one universe or dimension to another. (Is anyone else harking back to the Family at this point? 'Cause I swear, if that little girl with the red balloon starts popping out of mirrors, I am going to haul my couch out away from the wall so I can hide behind it.)

Now, personally, I think Black Spot is doing something at least a little more interesting than a lot of the reviews I have seen of it seem to think. The siren, it seems, is a medical program from a ship stalled in the same area as the pirate ship but in a different dimension. (Stones of Blood!) The siren is also not being as unhelpful as everyone thought: what she's trying to do is carry out her program and heal the injured and sick. (The Empty Child!) Seems like her program is a little damaged, though, and she can't quite figure out how to do her job right: all she can do is place people in stasis and leave them. (The Doctor Dances!) So, if nothing else, there are a crap-ton of series nods in this episode which are endlessly fun.

There are some lovely moments in this episode: the captain and his stowaway son; the siren and Amy in the stasis chamber; Amy and Rory in the TARDIS -- plus another near-death experience for Rory which got the response from the three of us watchers: "Oh, please, no, not again -- c'mon, Rory!" And sighs of relief all 'round when he didn't die (Kenny was funny...but only on South Park.) And the Doctor is yet again confronted with his desire to save everyone -- or at least to try and keep people from killing people or things until the situation is understood.

I really do think if you just take this episode for a cheerful, amusing romp with pirates, it's a pretty solidly good time. Yes, the CPR is wrong; is there a TV show that gets it right? Yup, there are dialogue goofs and continuity fluffs and it's just generally not perfect. Gosh. Shall we all storm the studios of BBC Wales and burn the place down now? Does the story hang together as tightly as (we hope) the season openers will (in the end)? Well, no -- but if everything were Day of the Moon, frankly, I don't know if I could cope. And there are space pirates at the end? Do you understand this, people? Space frelling pirates! Okay? Yes? Are we all good now?

So when it comes time to click into that third episode, make some good tea or get a glass of wine, pick out your favorite candy, and relax a bit. (Oh, except for when the woman peers through the wall at Amy. Tense up then. 'Cause, believe me, when you hit the end of the season, you're going to wish you spent a lot more time being tense around those moments.)

Bricks in the Wall

2011-08-09T09:55:00.000-04:00

I don't normally write about politics or current events because, honestly, I sometimes don't keep up with my news feeds for days at a time and there are many other people on the Internetz who cover that role far better than I ever could. Why duplicate what you can't either replicate or improve on?

But the first thing I checked this morning was the Guardian's live news feed of riot coverage and I was checking last night's live feed until a few minutes before I went to bed last night and what the fuck, people.

The parallel that comes to mind for me, inevitably, is Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular (because I spent about 10 years studying the IRA and three years writing a master's thesis about nationalism and Bobby Sands). All I could think every time I read a news story coming out of England on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning was, "Now London knows what it feels like to be Belfast." And that's just awful.

Did we not see this happen in Belfast in the '70s often enough that we needed to rerun it for kicks in London in the '10s? David Cameron's statement from this morning is, like so much of what comes out of his mouth, Margaret Thatcher redux: We will put more police on the streets. We will arrest lots of people. We will speed up the criminal courts. We will protect the law-abiding. We will restore order.

Would you like to know how bad it can get while order is being restored? It can get pretty fucking bad. It can turn into a major fucking nightmare.If you'd like to know how bad it can get, google "Diplock courts" (non-jury courts with a single judge) and try reading some Tim Pat Coogan or Padraig O'Malley or Kevin J. Kelley on Ireland of the '60s and '70s (Coogan is probably the most readable but also the most biased of the three). If you'd prefer first person narratives, try Richard O'Rawe's Blanketmen. Young men and women were arrested, detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, and binned up sometimes for years at a time for nothing more meaningful than being on the wrong street at the wrong time. Or being in a group. Or being out at a pub. Or -- and this is my favorite -- having the wrong last name. That's a good one, isn't it?

Do we really need to do this all again to prove that it was a bad idea the first time? Let me say it the short way: Demonising People Is A Bad Idea. (It doesn't make a catchy acronym but you can't have everything.) All it does is make them demonise you right back. There are at least 225+ years of Irish history to make this point and lots and lots and lots of dead people along the way.

Violence meets violence and gets more violent. At the minute, it's smash and burn looting and, yes, that's awful; yes, it should stop; yes, anyone hurting someone else should be punished. But if you drop 16,000 police officers on the streets instead of 10,000, how will that help? More uniforms to resent, to be scared of, to hate, to be angry at because the young people in these communities -- and plenty of the older people, I imagine -- don't see them as protectors. They're the bad guys, the ones who come and break up your party, or take away your friends, or stop you on the street because you're the wrong color or wearing the wrong jacket or the wrong shoes or in the wrong place.

A whole generation of Irish young men -- no longer young now -- could explain precisely how this dance goes. It doesn't end with a pleasantly stolen midnight kiss. It ends with dead people and resentment being built into the next generation of historical narratives that define "us" against "them" and set the stage for the next go-round whenever the provocation occurs.

The terminology of battle is already being used in the reporting and the Tweeting and liveblogging coming out of the injured areas; the phrase "war zone" is being tossed around. Businesses are boarding up, shutting down, closing "for the day." Some terrible language is being tossed around about the rioters.

I don't think that this one set of events will turn London into a divided city or a city armed against itself (it already is that), but it could lead to some very, very nasty things. Using precedent as a guide, we could look at the "peace wall" in Belfast or the tradition of having a bowl of water and a towel in your front hall for anyone -- literally, anyone -- who had been tear-gassed by the armed forces (police or Army) and might need first aid.

The Met is to be commended for not having asked for more serious gear in the wake of must be three nightmarish nights; their admission that plastic bullets may be used tonight is not a confidence-inducing one. Plastic bullets kill people and more uniforms on the streets won't fix the problem; yes, it might sit on its head and squash it out of existence for the time being, long enough for Cameron to take the credit for having "restored order" and get out of office -- but it will only pop up again and again and again.

This is Thatcherism coming home to roost. This is 20+ years of willful blindness on the part of successive administrations to the real, live, angry problems out there.

There's a great short piece from Tariq Ali on the London Review blog this morning that makes all the points I want to make except better and in more measured English:

Why is it that the same areas always erupt first, whatever the cause? Pure accident? Might it have something to do with race and class and institutionalised poverty and the sheer grimness of everyday life? The coalition politicians (including new New Labour, who might well sign up to a national government if the recession continues apace) with their petrified ideologies can’t say that because all three parties are equally responsible for the crisis. They made the mess.

They privilege the wealthy. They let it be known that judges and magistrates should set an example by giving punitive sentences to protesters found with peashooters. They never seriously question why no policeman is ever prosecuted for the 1000-plus deaths in custody since 1990.

One of my friends referred to this blog post as being about my "disappointment." Surprisingly, I am disappointed. I am distressed and unhappy and I wish there was something more concrete I could do than sit here and write a blog post making elaborate historical parallels. So I'm going to take a lesson from Stephen Fry here; in response to the awfulness in England yesterday, he tweeted 10 charities in need of donations; here's the link to the #riotcleanup tag in Twitter and the Facebook group and a Wiki.

It's Not This Cold in Boston. Yet.

2011-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for linking to this because I might not have found it otherwise.

And for the win mix of new series/old series references!

Friday Fun Times

2011-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

Not the cut I wanted (why do I feel like I say this a lot?), but still a fun song. I remember hearing Prine talk on a live album about picking up a newspaper when he was on tour in Europe -- he was in Rome at the time, if I recall right -- and reading the Dear Abby column and writing this song.

When he told the story, it was funny. Clearly -- when I tell it, it is not.

Enjoy the song anyway!

Photo Wednesday: Back from Maine

2011-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Hi folks,

Anna here, standing in for your usual blog mistress -- who is currently in the kitchen making a delicious veggie roast with fresh beets and onions from her parents' garden and kale from our CSA subscription. Summer is upon us and, lo, we are drowning in vegetables!

the green tomatoes await

We spent the weekend in Maine with Hanna's parents, who have an expansive vegetable garden and feed us three times a day on scrumptious baked goods (bagels, Finnish coffee bread, lemon meringue pie, chocolate chip cookies, ginger iced cream ...) and fresh-harvested beets, squash, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, onions, and more. Here are some photos I took while we were there.

Lunchtime!

This is not a hummingbird house,
but the hummingbirds were everywhere

In which in indulge my enjoyment of windows and doors.

Flowers in the garden...

...and vegetables (cabbage in this case; yum!)

The woodshed.

The old Norridgewock public library ...

...and the model Hanna and her father made when she was small.

Two younglings at the artisan bread fair
grinding cornmeal using a modified bicycle.

Watch for Hanna's return on Friday.

...many years ago, in college...

2011-08-01T00:00:00.001-04:00

Travelling today, folks; no opportunity to write a post.

So enjoy one of my favorite Dar Williams songs, instead. I saw her do this live when she opened for Joan Baez in ...er...well...199-humdeha.

Friday Fun Times: "Don't you forget me."

2011-07-29T00:00:00.001-04:00

Because why not have another good cry over Sarah Jane?

"It's Professor Song, sir. She's doing it again. Packing."

2011-07-27T00:00:00.002-04:00

Because I love the resignation of River's guards. They're just used to it by now. She's gonna hide the lipstick; they're gonna get hallucinogened -- and she's gonna get out. There's just no way around it.

:)

So I have in my possession one of the most wonderful things in the universe: the first half of season 6 of Doctor Who. Are we doing episode reviews? Yes, we are! Will there be spoilers? Most likely. Read with caution. I did see someone blogging at Tor.com who claimed to have written a spoiler-free review of the new Torchwood series and I didn't even give it the time of day. I don't see how it's possible without saying. "There's Torchwood. This is Jack. And this is Gwen. And over there's Rhys. And some things happened. And it was cool." Yeaaaaah -- we all know that already.

In any case, lets proceed: The Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon. No plot outline here -- I don't think I could do it if I tried! ("So...the Doctor dies -- and then he's still alive. And there's this kid -- but it isn't really a kid -- but it might be! And these things, but you can't remember you've seen them when you've seen them...")

I think the phrase I'm looking for here, the words that just totally encapsulate my reaction to this episode -- and, indeed, the season 2-parter opening -- are "Gblagh? Hnghg? What -- what -- what?" Said in my best David Tennant voice, of course.

Everything about Astronaut and Moon is slightly --- off. The colors, the feel, the music, the story -- everything's weird. And not in a, "Well, it's okay; blame the Angels" kinda way but in a, "Lets start out by shooting the Doctor in the chest!" kinda way.

May I point out: I was not okay with that. Yes, I really do stand by what I said earlier: the Doctor should stop at 12 -- or 13, depending on how you want to count -- there should be no jiggling about with original series canon in this respect -- but that didn't mean I wanted to watch him get shot three times at point-blank range! By someone who may or may not be Amy's child. Or River's, for that matter! (Anyone else feel slightly nauseated after watching this one? or do I just have a sympathetic tummy?)

My gut reaction to both Astronaut and Moon, is that nothing feels real. It feels like a freakin' fever dream: the colors are hypersaturated (check that lakeside picnic scene!) or totally drained (Oval Office, anyone?); the music is funky (electric guitar?); and nothing seems to quite hook together in the right order (so many things I can't count but we can start with the Doctor, move on to River, then to Amy's "pregnancy"...) And what's with the woman in the wall? I really thought I had maybe imagined that until I watched the show the second time around and realised, no, no, it really was as bad as I had thought.

You know what I really love about this season opener? Apart from Canton Everett Delaware III, that is? It's unsettling -- it's really quite scary and not just because the Silence are a little freaky (does anyone really believe that this is the Silence as in "Silence will fall"? 'Cause I don't.) The Doctor doesn't seem to know what's going on; River is increasingly off her game and preoccupied; and...I'm not sure we have the same Amy all the time. Or that our time-line is even contingous all the time; I do not think that things necessarily lead one to another here. Or, if they do, that Thing 2 is the same Thing 2 Thing 1 originally started out with. If you get my drift.

I remember saying when I was writing about season 5 at one point that I thought the entire story (or stories?) was taking place in Amy's head. Obviously, with shows like The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang, this is literally true: Amy's memories are responsible for how the world is (when her memories have been used to create it) and for recreating it when the universe is gone. And I feel it's true again here. It all seems to be about Amy or -- headache-inducing possibility -- Amy's child? Or is it River's child? And, really, I have to put my money on the table here: if either of these women end up reduced to being important because of their kid? I am gonna kill something. And it won't be them. Of all the tropes in SFF, I think I hate that one the most. It really makes me taste metal and want to kick something. Hard.

So I'm going to decide that that's not what's happening here because I don't want to buy trouble.

And there are so many lovely things happening here like the fucked-up orphanage with the crazy Southern dude leaving himself helpful notes all over the walls, but totally unable to act upon them because the Silence keep springing out of the woodwork and screwing his memory all to hell. Again. Some more.

There's CED III, too. I had my doubts when I heard Mark Sheppard was going to be around in season 6 -- I mean, yeah, he had a good hat, but -- was Firefly street cred really going to see him through? Oh, totally -- man had a ball and I had a ball watching him do it. I love his delight -- what I think is both Sheppard's and Delaware's -- in getting to be one of the TARDIS crew. And I think he and Captain Jack will get along just dandy if and when they ever meet up. :)

Last but not least: what the fuck is up with the little girl? I have gone through the list of possible Time Lords so many times in my head, I can't tell you. I know John Simm said he would come back to do a regeneration sequence for the Master, so I'm fairly certain we're not looking at the Master mark....14 or whatever the hell he's up to now. The Rani? Whoa. That would be...whoa -- but -- also kind of -- meh? Lets face it -- and I love Kate O'Mara -- the Rani never had the same charisma as the Master. Surely not the Meddling Monk, for heaven's sake! I know RTD brought back the Macra, but that really would be hauling out an oldie-but-goodie. So -- a new villain? a new good guy?

What puzzles me -- along with a number of other things -- is whether or not we're meant to think the astronaut in some way has stolen regeneration energy from the Doctor? Because as far as I know, that hasn't ever happened before and can't really be explained in canonical terms. I suppose...perhaps Moffat is planning to improvise wildly on the "Time Lord metacrisis" concept?

Interesting stuff anyway! A fascinatingly dark opening to the season.

Darkness on Monday

2011-07-25T00:00:00.001-04:00

I recently had the energy to pick up and read Stephen King's latest volume of short stories, Full Dark, No Stars. The collection won the 2010 Stoker award -- Joe Hill tweeted very nicely about that -- and I'd read other good reviews of the collection and thought it was probably time I got around to it.

In my opinion, King is almost always better in short than long with the possible exception of the Dark Tower series and even there he starts to suffer from verbal diarrhea more than once. Man just can't stop once he gets started.

I'm not saying that this collection is the exception -- the four long-ish stories in it ("1922," "Big Driver," "Fair Extension," and "A Good Marriage") are pretty good. Solid King, you might say; there are all his old familiar tropes: man kills wife; woman kills attacker; deal with the devil; horrible discovery in family. There's nothing here that you haven't seen before if you've read more than one King novel or previous collection of short fiction.

What caught my attention and prompted this post is King's insistence, and that of several reviewers I read, that these were his "darkest" short stories. In his afterword, he specifically describes them as such, talking about how dark and serious and disturbing they are.

I read the volume at a go one hot Sunday afternoon, read the afterword, and sat there thinking, 'Dark? Dark? Mr. King, sir -- what is this dark of which you speak?'

Sure, the stories are vintage King as described above but I don't know if, in all fairness, I would describe any of them as being darker than, say, "Dolan's Cadillac," "You Know They Got A Hell of A Band," or "Home Delivery" from Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Or "The Raft" or "The Mist" in Skeleton Crew. Or "The Road Virus Heads North" in Everything's Eventual.

And then I started to wonder about what I mean when I said "dark" and what King might mean -- and then I decided not to worry about that because trying to figure out what someone else means when they use a word is pretty much a mug's game unless they're standing right in front of you and you can ask them. I'm not going to trudge all the way up to Bangor just to bang on the man's door and ask him an obscure question about the afterword to his latest book.

What I do know is that none of the stories in Full Dark had the same feeling of menace, of inevitable doom, and of bleakness that I think make the stories I named above so genuinely dark and threatening. Take "The Road Virus Heads North," for example -- it's a pretty basic "purchase a haunted/possessed item -- purchase the haunter/possessor" story. A man stops at a yard sale, is struck by the painting of a young man in a muscle car heading north over the Tobin Bridge from Boston, and buys it. As he takes it further north with him towards his home, the painting begins to change. It becomes clear to the reader, if not the poor sumph of a narrator, that he's being followed. Perhaps even hunted. I find "The Road Virus" terrifying -- every time I read it, the inevitability of the narrator's pretty ghastly demise is still frightening. The doom he manages to avert from some of the others along the path of the Virus is awful -- the implacability of the antagonist quite real.

And check out "Home Delivery," man! Woman alone on island facing birth of first child after the descent of the zombie apocalypse. Bad enough? Oh, did I mention her husband drowned recently? Yeahhhhhh -- think that one, through. And keep your knitting needles handy. What I like about "Home Delivery" is the common-sense approach of the character to an unbelievable situation; yes, it approaches the pragmatism of the narrator in "Big Driver" (once she gets done being traumatized) but "Big Driver" then descends into a straightforward rape revenge drama. Pretty rote, once you figure out what's going on. "Home Delivery" takes you on a hell of a ride, not forgetting the heaving cemetary dirt scene.

I think what these stories have in common that I didn't feel in any of the work in Full Dark is a sense of claustrophobia, fear of something awful that you can't get away from. Yes, the characters in Full Dark, in "Fair Extension" and "1922" particularly, are doomed by their actions -- but their actions are also avoidable. There's no point in any of the stories when you feel, "Aha. There's the click. The key's turned in the lock -- hell, that fucker's broken off in the lock, and here we go." It always seems reversible. There's no sense in this collection that the you can't kill the boogeyman -- in fact, in "A Good Marriage," that's exactly what the protagonist does. Yes, it's horrible; yes, her journey of discovery is wrenching; but it also doesn't feel as immediate and as clutching as, say, the fate of the teenagers on "The Raft."

None of the stores in Full Dark have that feeling. Yeah, in "1922," the narrator pretty much buys his own ticket to hell by bludgeoning his wife to death and getting his son to come in on the deal. But the rest of the story is really just an exercise in Lovecraftian inspiration and a long-drawn out version of HPL's "The Rats in the Walls" -- except not as good. (Sorry, Mr. King.) "Big Driver" is just -- well, I thought it was just bad. We don't need to go into why.

Anyway, the point of this post was not to get into trashing the stories in Full Dark -- they're worth a read, particularly in you're a King fan. I just wanted to say that I don't think they're very dark; perhaps there's just a twinkle or two in the sky -- maybe the glow of a city in the distance. That's all.

Friday Fun Times

2011-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

"The fish like the music."

2011-07-20T00:00:00.002-04:00

I remember when the Doctor Who 2010/2011 Christmas special came out, I saw a headline in the Guardian that made some comment about the show "jumping the shark."

And I thought, "Ah, fuck -- they lost their grip and fumbled the special. Oh, well, after such a good season, no-one will blame them for it." And I clicked into the story -- only to discover that the end of the sentence was "...and landed perfectly." Or words to that effect.

Having been forced by the vagaries of the DVD market and the wonders of the BBC marketing division -- does anyone know if they're still employed, by the way? -- to wait a whole month (or two; I can't now remember) to see the special, I couldn't immediately take in the glories of the Guardian reviewer's commentary.

Now having seen the special several times, I have to say: I absolutely, whole-heartedly, and 100% concur.

And, to coin a phrase, "Spoilers." Not really huge gigantic brain-sucking ones, but still.

Not to belabor my point but, short of the Runaway Bride, this may be my favorite of the Christmas specials. Yes, I love the Starship Titanic: there is Geoffrey Palmer, there is Russell Tovey, there is Kylie Minogue -- but there is also a lot of pain and, honestly, now I can't look at Midshipman Frame now in any context without seeing Captain Jack post-Children of Earth and that's just bad. We'll get to how bad that is in another post.

The Doctor Who Christmas Carol is a worrying, perfect thing. The few blog posts I have read about it are pretty much unanimous in how awesome it is, so I'm not going to spend too much time on that. It is awesome and if you happen not to agree with that verdict, you have long since stopped reading this post -- not to mention this blog, so that's all good.

I want to talk about the worrying -- and then again about the perfect. But lets hit up worrying first.

Sardik's machine that controls the sky.

I haven't seen a single commentary that talks about how disturbing the Doctor is in this story. Hello? Anyone? Anyone else out there think what he does is totally freaky and a little unokay? Lets just have a brief review, shall we? Amy and Rory, on their honeymoon, as organized by the Doctor. Their ship -- the standard super-luxurious space cruise-liner -- is crashing. The only man who can stop the ship crashing is Kazran Sardik, the self-nominated ruler of the planet who "controls the skies." The Doctor goes down to ask Sardik -- quite nicely -- to clear the cloud layer over the planet and allow the ship to land. Sardik -- not very nicely at all -- refuses.

Cue the Doctor's meddling side, apparently, because, man, does he go all out. Not satisfied with browbeating Sardik in the present -- and it is Michael Gambon after all; I love Matt Smith but even he has a little way to go before he can truly go toe-to-toe with Gambon -- the Doctor immediately travels back in Sardik's life to his boyhood and plunges into trying to rebuild the man from the ground up. Sardik's memories of the past as he remembers it and as it is being rebuilt for him by the Doctor begin to collide and reshape.

I mean, yeah, as Amy says to Sardik at one point, "He was trying to make you a better man." But what right does he have to do that? Who the hell, to coin a phrase, is he? He takes personal, by hand control of Sardik's life and, admittedly, he tries to undo or ameliorate a lot of damage. Sardik's father is abusive; his emotional life is stunted; and, as events develop, the woman he idolizes as a boy and loves as a young man, is dying, confined to a tiny metal cell in an induced cold sleep by his father. So, yeah, pretty not good all 'round -- but I don't know as the Doctor makes it a lot better.

This is very similar to what the Doctor attempts, as 10, in Waters of Mars except this time -- major point here -- he gets away with it.

Sardik and the Doctor face off.

Yes, some of what he does for Sardik is wonderful: when talking to the older Sardik, the Doctor mentions that perhaps Sardik Senior was a bit of the not-good kind of father. Perhaps Sardik Junior has an opportunity to be a different man and wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? And even when forcibly rewriting Sardik's memories, he takes him -- and Abigail; mustn't forget Abigail -- to some wonderful places, shows them glories of the universe including his own unscheduled wedding to Marilyn Monroe.

And the Doctor's original reappearance back in Sardik's memory as he recalls being a sobbing boy in his room is absolutely in keeping with the tenor of the rest of the season: don't interfere...unless there's a crying child. Sardik's line that leads into the quick TARDIS jump to the past is something the Doctor could never resist: "...no-one comes." Well, how could he ignore that? I mean, c'mon! He's been trying so hard to be good and I think that's possibly why I find what he does with Sardik's past life so disturbing: he tries so hard to be good and talk to him in the here and now and when he can't change things that way...

But on the whole -- I get uneasier and uneasier every time I watch the show. What the Doctor does is just not good and he gets away with it which is bad.

So there. I've made my point about what I feel is the "worrying" bit of Christmas Carol and we can finish by talking about what the "perfect" is which is everything else including the "worrying.". If I wasn't a little bit worried, I would think Steven Moffat wasn't doing his job (and, by the way, Moffat? We need to talk about the proposed Sherlock seasons and where you need to be putting your effort in the next few years. Just whenever you have a few minutes...).

Because you have to have snow.

Rory and Amy are great as the honeymoon couple ("Eyes off the skirt!") and I could have even done with a little more Rory -- but I feel that way a lot. I can't wait for the episode I'm sure he gets in Season 6 where he just steps up, sheds the flannel'y outside, and goes for it -- in whatever form that takes.

Abigail is a lovely, sweet, absolutely charming character. Her voice is...revelatory. The British press talked about her casting as a huge give-away but I had no idea who she was; in the promo photos, she was just the blonde lady holding a lamp. Her rendering of "In the Bleak Midwinter" is gorgeous.

The fish -- the fish are great. The fish are...just so great. They make me smile uncontrollably every time I watch the show.

The Doctor's entrance is fantastic ("My whole brain just went...what the hell!") and Matt Smith doesn't really stumble once in this -- neither does anyone else in the cast. They pick up what could have been a thin, unconvincing story with far too much schmoop and transform it into brilliant Doctor Who and a great story.

And so, as a closing thought, have a Wednesday video. If you wish to skip some great stuff about fish and fog and frozen people, skip straight to 12.30. Otherwise, just enjoy.

Doctor Who- A Christmas Carol- Part2 by root41

Short Thought: "When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. ~H.G. Wells"

2011-07-18T00:00:00.009-04:00

So here's your headslap moment for the day -- a little delayed, since this Boston Globe op-ed went up last week -- but, hey, a good headslap moment is good at any time, right?

Okay, fine, but last week I tweaked out my wrist and couldn't type. A little delay is only normal.

Boston Globe op-ed columnist Brian McGrory wants to ban bicycles from Boston. Why does he want to do this? Well, they annoy him. Folks on bikes -- he doesn't like 'em. Spandex, not his thing. L.L. Bean cycling outfits leave him cold. And he feels cyclists as a group are rude, inconsiderate, thoughtless people.

Isn't it good that all Boston drivers are so considerate, thoughtful, and attentive people, then.

You never walk past one -- and I walk everywhere -- who is texting while driving.

You never walk past one who has just cut off an old lady on a crosswalk in an attempt to cut off someone else for on-street parking.

You never go through a pedestrian crossing and feel a breeze on the back of your legs as someone takes an illegal right turn.

Nah. In Boston? Man, that'd never happen.

(I said it was a good headslap moment, didn't I?)

Are there rude cyclists in Boston? Sure -- of course there are, because they're people and people -- along with demonstrating a wide variety of other behaviors -- can be rude. You know what this means? There are also rude drivers in Boston -- there's a reason Massachusetts drivers have the nicknames they do in the New England area. Hint for those of you not from New England: the best one (my personal favorite) starts with "Mass" and ends with a single syllable noun easily discoverable by testing out rhymes for "mass."

And, please, Mr. McGrory, don't tell me about Boston being "designed for cars." I can only stand so much hysterical laughter once in a week and most of mine was taken up with Stargate: Atlantis/Girl Scout cookie porn. (Truly. Hilarious.)

Beacon Hill? Built for cars? Yeah, sure -- that first wave of settlers who began building around what was then an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean were totally working on spec for Chevy. Don't insult my intelligence, Mr. McGrory; it makes me grumpy. Try checking some facts past the Mass Historical Society, the State Archives, and the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections next time -- they can tell you exactly when the main roads of the city were laid out and when the city started being "designed for cars."

Tell you what, Mr. McGrory. You want to reduce traffic congestion in Boston? I thoroughly support this idea. This is a fantastic idea.

Here's how to do it.

Take a leaf from the books of London and Paris and ban private passenger vehicles from Beacon Hill, the North End, Downtown Crossing, and the financial district. I can think of a few other choice areas -- like Harvard Yard -- but those will do to start with.

Don't let taxi-cabs cruise for passengers.

And you really want to do a number on the congestion on sidewalks? Here's a nifty notion: ban baby carriages. Especially those side-by-side "I got an extra zygote!" numbers. Hey, if I want it, I have to take it with me; if my cat has to get to the vet, I -- or my partner -- have to carry her there. You bred it; you carry it. Got two? Then it looks like one fore and one aft for you: think of the noble koala bear and work up those lumbar muscles.

Friday Fun Times

2011-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

Youtube is seriously lacking in Maura O'Connell. I wanted the cut from her Austin City Limits gig, but this was the best I could do. It doesn't matter, really; ignore the back-up musicians; listen to her.

Short Thoughts: "How [Not] To Do It"

2011-07-06T00:00:00.008-04:00

And to those of you who realised the complicated Python joke I just made: congratulations. Now go outside and get some fresh air. I'll join you momentarily.

At the library a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, by Glynis Ridley. While the book sells itself nicely -- the cover is attractive; the blurbs impressive; and the subject matter highly appealing as we'll see -- why I actually picked it up is an old Beverley Nichols book on gardens -- one of many he wrote and they're all wonderful light reading if you're looking for something so English it creaks -- where he -- or possibly the character he wrote to stand in for Aldous Huxley? -- tells the story of the discovery of the bougainvillea in tropical seas.

The story involves the simultaneous discovery that the assistant of the botanist credited with the discovery of the plant was discovered to be a woman. The story as Nichols tells it -- or retells it; I don't have the book to hand -- is pleasingly vague and focussed mostly on the discovery of the plant rather than on anything to do with the young woman...although it does suggest she had a less than pleasant afternoon with the sailors on the island where the bougainvillea bloomed so plentifully.

Ridley has discovered this story, too -- why not, after all? It's a great story! Enlightenment France, botanical discovery, trans-oceanic voyages, cross-dressing -- what's not to like? Well, lots, frankly, at least in Ridley's handling.

I must say, in all fairness, I didn't finish the book. But there are reasons and I'll get there in as short a fashion as I can. To put it as briefly as possible: Ridley commits just about every version of the sin of presentism in writing history as it is possible to commit. In addition to this, with the self-announced, loudly trumpeted goal of giving Jeanne Baret, the young cross-dressing botanist, her voice and agency as an individual back, Ridley only redefines the role of victim and Baret really moves nowhere.

Admittedly, this is not entirely Ridley's fault. Baret left only questionable written evidence behind -- some papers in the botanist Commerson's collection have been tentatively reidentified as in her hand -- and no cache of letters, diaries, or notes from any point in her life, to say nothing of the climactic voyage of discovery have been found to help along the curious researcher.

Despite this, excellent biographies have been written by historians with equally shady or scattered or shadowed evidence -- Annette Gordon-Reed, anyone? To say nothing of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich -- she had more evidence, yes, but the skull-sweat needed to make it into anything useful is just staggering.

I wish I could say that Ridley had done the same kind of work in rehabilitating Baret and bringing her back to the central role she may deserve in the botanizing of French ships in the tropics. Instead, she reduces Baret to the status of a hanger-on, even falling into the fatal trap of putting unjustified words, thoughts, and emotions into her experience to justify what to Ridley seems like the obvious. Well, yes -- it is the obvious to a 21st century reader (at least, a certain type of 21st century reader), but not so much to an 18th century French peasant woman. She probably lived with a very different type of obvious and to pretend anything else is to do a radical disservice to her.

I really wanted The Discovery... to be something better than it was; when it descended to the level of imaginary psychobiography, I was done.

What Baret did -- even when seen through the lens of other contemporary diaries and accounts -- was phenomenal, even if you only consider what she did in France: moving from the countryside to Paris with her richer, better-educated lover; leaving her family behind permanently in the south; taking over housekeeping of a Paris household; bearing a child and leaving it at an orphanage at her lover's insistence -- and then the capstone experience (if you wish to see it like that) of choosing to cross-dress and accompany said lover on a massively dangerous ocean voyage with no promise of pay-off. Are you kidding me? You couldn't write a novel that good! And to reduce Baret's choices and motivation to those of "following her lover" and "rape trauma" as Ridley does is deeply disrespectful.

Ahem.

Rant over.

And before you go on with your day, please enjoy this lovely photo of Beverley Nichols with some of his cats.

Friday Fun Times

2011-07-01T00:00:00.001-04:00

Because I feel like campiness and because I've been watching Highlander. No, I will not be blogging about it.

"Check your records again."

2011-06-29T00:00:00.002-04:00

I bet you thought I'd forgotten all about the end of Season 5 of Doctor Who, didn't you?

HaHA! I had not! And now that we have a double-DVD player lash-up that allows me to actually watch my damned Season 5 DVDs, I have rewatched the season ender and now have comments. HaHA!

Ahem.

So, anyway, yes, spoilers ahead. Don't read if you haven't seen the end of Season 5, yaddayaddayadda.

On with the show.

I'm not even going to try to give any kind of story re-cap with this two-parter because, well, I can't. It's a little confusing and rather roundabout in parts and, really, I'd just be guaranteeing that I would miss out on some super-important detail and look like a fan failure, and nobody wants that.

So here are some unordered thoughts on The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang.

1) It was so nice to have a season ender where I didn't use up every tissue in the house and have to go sniffling for a wad of toilet paper or some paper towels. I know a lot of fans have complained about the emotional intensity of the series under Moffat's direction as opposed to good ol' "Reach In and Rip Your Heart Out" Davies, but I'm enjoying -- have enjoyed? am planning to continue enjoying? -- this slightly lighter approach. Not that I think the base-level intensity of the stories that need to be intense or the intensity of the character relationship has changed; I have seen people argue that they think they have -- that they think the quality of the show has gone all to hell and this is just fiddly-diddly "kids' stuff" now and to them I say: Fooie. Or, more accurately: "I'm the Doctor. Basically...run."

Because if you seriously think the Doctor has gone fuzzy-wuzzy in his old(-er) age or that Matt Smith is playing the Doctor-lite, I invite you to rethink The Beast Below, Vincent and the Doctor, Amy's Choice, and/or The Big Bang and then reconsider your opinions. This isn't a gutless wonder version of the show; this is just less of a "heart on my sleeve" version of the show. If you want confirmation of that, watch the Doctor's face when Patient Zero, as Amy-and-the-Doctor, accuses him of being a disappointment. Being slapped with a fish just isn't in it.

All that said -- and probably to be said again and elaborated upon at some point in the near future 'cause, gosh, am I tired of people hatin' on 11 -- this was a slightly underwhelming season ender -- and that was kind of pleasant. The end of Season 4 and the Tennant specials were just so much dramatic tension and everything was being ratcheted up and up and up for the giant pain-fest that was The End of Time that it was nice, in comparison, to have a relatively quiet finale. Yeah, there was a serious problem; yeah, it had serious consequences; yeah, some shit had to go down in order to get things resolved (and are they really resolved? of course not!) but no-one got eaten like a hamburger; there was no brain-burning; and the Doctor didn't have to crash through a roof or absorb any unhealthy amounts of radiation. Admittedly, he did have to explode and then deal with the consequences -- in one of the best scenes in the entire two-parter, if not the entire season -- but it seemed easier to watch somehow.

2) Amy and Rory make my heart happy. Rory, in particular, makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside and I hope someone hugs Arthur Darvill on a regular basis just to thank him for showing up on a daily basis and being made of awesome. His re-meet-up with the Doctor is one of my favorite moments in the ender: I love his final dry rejoinder to the Doctor's babbling on about how there's something important he's missed that's right in front of him: "Yeah. I think you have." Rory has learned just a massive amount over the course of this season and his ability to be stand-up -- and to stand up to the Doctor which is not easy -- is just fantastic. The whole "Mr. Pond" dialogue between him and the Doctor is wonderful and I love that he steps up to the challenge without a moment of hesitation at the end. And, no, I don't feel it's just because he wants to follow Amy.

3) Amy is...the center of all things. I have a feeling that Amy will continue to be the center of all things. The Doctor likes her; River likes her; the TARDIS likes her. This is like the trifecta of "Things Which Are Dangerous But Want To Be Your Friend."

4) River. I may be the only person out here not panting to know what super-secret-uber-chocolatey something River is going to turn out to be. Despite this stance, I would like to point out two things: A) the Dalek. Has anyone ever seen a Dalek beg for mercy from anything? *listens* Yeah, that's what I thought. B) River comes back on her own. I've watched The Big Bang a number of times now and I'm convinced that she comes back into the rebuilt universe on her own steam and, unlike Amy and Rory, remembers what's going on. Why else would she send in her (blank) diary to Amy? She knows what has to happen and, as River always does, is doing her best to jog it along.

5) Does anyone else think that a tiny -- just a teeny tiny -- portion of The Pandorica Opens depends on the Doctor not listening closely to anything he is saying?

6) But forget that: lets talk about the fabulous -- but fabulous -- monologue at the end of The Big Bang. It's wonderful. The Doctor moving backwards through Amy's time-stream and trying to plant enough cues that she will be able to save him and finally...giving up? A little bet, yes, I think so. He has to give up because she has to make the final steps on her own, without him, and the Doctor always hates doing that. I would like to point out once again the difference between 10 desperately trying to keep Donna from remembering and 11 practically rearranging galaxies to keep Amy remembering -- both Rory and himself. But -- on the other hand, is he the dark shadow moving through Amy's house at the beginning of Eleventh Hour or...not? Personally, I'm leaning towards not.

So the end call? Fantastic stuff. The more I watch it, the more I like it. I've gone from "eh -- it was good" to "wow, that was great" in about 3 watchings. Every time I watch either or both episodes, I see more things, notice more details.

Plus, what is not to like about an episode in which you get this:

I mean...yes, right? Yes.

Short Thoughts: Also, Magical Cats

2011-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

I've been doing something that I should have done a long time ago: watch through Hiyao Miyazaki's/Studio Ghibli's back catalog.

Believe it or not, until recently, I had only ever seen two of these films: Mononoke Hime and Nausicaa. I love them both and I own Nausicaa -- a fancy collector's edition, actually, that was a birthday gift -- but I hadn't seen anything else.

Now I've got two more under my belt -- Castle in the Sky and Howl's Moving Castle, which I know isn't technically a Miyazaki story since he adapted it from the late Diana Wynne Jones' novel which I have never read.

And I always have the same reaction and now I've come to expect it as I start to watch: "Oh, this again. I know how this goes. Yes, yes, I know what all this looks like. Yup, there's little furry things. Oh, well, I guess this is the one where..." And then the dots lead into the bit where my brain simply goes wstfgl because something so lovely and unexpected has happened that I can't think what to think about it for a minute.

I don't know how else to explain it, really, other than by saying that every time I think, "Oh, this is just another Miyazaki movie; fine," there is always something surprising and something that transcends the film. Maybe it isn't a grand philosophical statement -- although sometimes it is -- but most often it's something that's simply beautiful.

Or weird.

Or both.

Friday Fun Times: "Michael O'Sullivan was my great friend..."

2011-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

This one has a long instrumental lead-in; stick with it. You'll be glad you did.

You May Wish To Turn This Up

2011-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Bad week this week, folks. So enjoy some music.

Photo Monday: Chihuly at the MFA

2011-06-20T00:00:00.001-04:00

Guest post by Anna. Cross-posted at the feminist librarian.

Now that I'm finished with graduate school, I have my weekends back (hooray!) and Hanna and I have been trying to re-learn what it means to spend leisure time together ... time not compressed by the anxieties and demands of trying to complete academic work on top of a 35-hour work week and, you know, the daily tasks of living.

Walking home through Fenway Victory Gardens
Photograph by Hanna

I seriously don't understand how couples who have full-time jobs manage to care for children. Is there time travel involved? Because caring for our family as just two adults is difficult enough.

Anyway. Back to basics. How do you enjoy a weekend that's truly a weekend ... as in: time off from one's regular mode of employment?

I thought it might be fun to spend a few months playing quasi-tourist in our own city. Particularly since, as an employee of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I have free admission to lots of cultural sites in the region. (Free entertainment always being preferable when you've got student loans to pay off!) Over the past four years, I haven't found a lot of time to make use of this benefit, but I've decided that this should change. Therefore: watch for more "from the neighborhood" posts in the coming months, as Hanna and I explore new parts of our own backyard.

Our first stop, this weekend, was the Museum of Fine Arts, just up the road from the MHS. The MFA is currently hosting an ehibit of work by glass artist Dale Chihuly. I'f you've never seen Chihuly's work, I highly recommend checking out the photos and video clips on his website -- the installations are breathtaking. I first saw his work at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan about a decade ago and can't think of anything that's more soul-enriching than sitting in one of his galleries and soaking in the color. Here are some photographs we took at the exhibition here in Boston.

So much of his work looks like ocean life of some kind

The camera washed out the color on this one, but I love the reflection.
See a better image at Chihuly's homepage.

See what I mean about the tide pool effect?

Hanna and I agree he should design
sets for Tim Burton...

Chandelier detail

Shadow pictures especially for my mother, who is
currently working on a photography series like this.

Chandelier (by Hanna)
Hard to tell here, but these are massive.

I love seeing his work in organic settings;
sadly, the MFA space had few outdoor installations.

Purple reeds (by Hanna)

All in all, it was an amazing way to spend our Saturday morning. Not sure what we have planned for our next outing, but rest assured I'll take the camera and report back!

Friday Fun Times

2011-06-17T00:00:00.003-04:00

The video is nothing special -- although there are some lovely B&W photos of kd in there -- so just sit back and close your eyes.

Just Sayin'

2011-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

As we bask in the mid-season glory of Doctor Who season 6 and I madly dodge spoilers on all my blogs and Tumblr feeds, a blog post came to me.

And the essence of the blog post is this: River Song? Already a badass.

Seriously, folks.

Daleks are scared of this woman, okay? Daleks. The big bad. The original big bad since 1964. Are scared of this chick. As in begging for mercy scared.

She doesn't need to be "revealed" as anyone awesome and I am saying this as someone who would have happily kicked her out of an airlock about halfway through Silence in the Library. River Song? Is made of awesome.

I'm sure Moffat has something in mind. I'm sure it will be interesting. I'm equally sure it won't be as cool as River already is. I don't care if she's the Doctor, the Master, the Meddling Monk, Susan, Jenny, Captain Jack, Rassilon, the TARDIS, or the living personification of the time-space continuum itself.

River? Already badass.

Photo Monday

2011-06-13T00:00:00.003-04:00

Because I feel just totally inspired with text this week ---

-- here are some photos.

Me, trying to be arty with a glass of beer, a camera,
and not moving off the couch to take a photo.

Geraldine, asleep in a totally dignified fashion.

Baby ducks, posing helpfully in the Public Gardens.

Ditto, but made of cute!

The Muddy River, not being muddy.

Roses in the allotment gardens.

Ditto.

Can you guess? Hey, there were a ton of roses, they were
all gorgeous, it had just been raining...

Lily. Of some kind. Um. Yeah.

No points for guessing this time!

You see my point about how many there were, right?

Lots.

Friday Fun Times

2011-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Susan Tedeschi covering John Prine at Austin City Limits.

Movies In Which Meeting the Family (Or Going on Long Trips) Is Not Good

2011-06-07T16:12:00.001-04:00

So this post is really in response to a conversation a few days ago between myself, Anna, Lola, and Minerva.

If you're reading through and thinking, "There must be an in-joke here," you're absolutely right -- there is! But feel free to make up your own.

And these movies aren't in order -- unless you count "what I thought of as I was walking home" as order.

Dog Soldiers. "Why, yes, please come take shelter in my way-the-hell-back-in-the-woods family home. Which is deserted, now you come to mention it. And also smack in the middle of Scottish werewolf country. And...by the way...did I mention....I have really big teeth?"

Carriers. "Road trip! Wait -- what does that little symbol mean?" I've written a whole post about how much I hate this movie, but in terms of demonstrating why road trips will always end in bloody, bloody death, Carriers is a pretty solid example: four charming young things decide to go on an alcohol-soaked road trip -- to...Vegas? Reno? I can't even remember -- and end up as one of the lone surviving groups in an infected and deadly world. You know who ends up living? The whiny younger brother and the truly bitchy self-serving girl. Thanks, movie, for destroying those stereotypes for us. Well done. *headdesk*

The classic, of course, Psycho. "Gee, I guess I haven't checked in on Mom lately..."

In the Mouth of Madness. Weekend road trip to quiet New England town? Sounds fantastic! In search of reclusive famous author? Great! Beautiful scenery? Check! Cosy B 'n B? Absolutely. Demons from beyond the brink of comprehension coming to twist your soul and devour your every thought? Of cou--wait a minute, what?

The Lost Tribe. A gorgeous long vacation in a pleasure cruise -- oops! The boat sank. But look! There's a deserted island just perfect for being a rescue site. What's this weird deserted work-camp in the middle of the island? Why are there bones everywhere? What's that growling noise? Who happened to Ted?! (Plus, this happens to be a truly sucktastic movie. Really just -- really dreadful. If you want to watch this film, do yourself a favor and watch Predator instead.)

It Waits. Awful thing happens. You retreat with your pain to a distant fire-station in the beautiful remote wilderness. And what happens? A huge flesh-eating revenge demon bursts out of its long-buried cave to come play with you. Will you and your helpful pet parrot survive? Well...

Curse of the Komodo. (Yes, I watched it. No, I'm not proud of it -- I was severely depressed, okay?!) Relaxing weekend on spa island? Nope, giant genetically mutated komodo dragons with -- and get this -- infectious disease spit. *sigh* Plus, lets discuss the quality of the computer animation -- if the dragons don't scare you (which they shouldn't) you may very well laugh yourself into a conniption at the "My teenage brother did it last night" quality of the effects.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Where do you go to take sanctuary during the zombie apocalypse (Stage 2)? Well, a nice big church would be a good idea, yes? Solid doors, high-up windows, potential for raiding the vicar's cookie store in the pulpit...sound logic all 'round! Until you realise the vicar's living in the church -- with his infected sister -- who he has wired to a chair -- oh, and he's been feeding her. Just don't ask about the wedding catering.

And last but not least (in this version of the list, anyway):

28 Weeks Later. Here's a note for all the rest of you who plan to survive the apocalypse: if you abandon your wife to a horde of flesh-eating disease victims, don't look back. Just don't. Don't go pick up your kids at the train station; don't try to make nicey-nice like this is all fine; and above all, if you do feel the need to try and rebuild the shattered remnants of your family, don't, for the love of God and everyone else in your tiny, disease-free citadel, lie about what happened to your wife. Because, if you do, it will not end well. She will come back; and you will try to kiss her hello; and -- well, to put it simply, have you ever heard of Typhoid Mary?

And to the kids: when you return from abroad to your disease-ravaged and strangely deserted home city, don't go home. Just...don't. Ever.

Friday Fun Times

2011-06-03T00:00:00.001-04:00

The video quality on this isn't great, but you don't need to see it -- just hear it.

Post-Vacation Reading Round-up

2011-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I was going to write something about the Key to Time arc episode The Androids of Tara for today but, honestly, I find that episode pretty unspectacular and I was stuck fast on even coming up with a title for this blog post. So, I decided to do something else.

My last little round of reading looked like this (in no particular order)....

The Social Life of Coffee, Brian Cowan.

I thought this book was going to be different than it turned out to be. While I cannot confirm this -- without additional research I am unwilling to undertake! -- I suspect that this is Mr. Cowan's doctoral dissertation turned into a book. Lots of historians -- and other scientists and social scientists -- do this and it's just fine. I mean, you've done all that freakin' work -- what are you going to do? abandon it? shove all your notes into a box and pretend it didn't happen? Yeah, right. You're going to milk it for all it's worth and, in the case of Cowan's book, it's worth quite a lot. I was anticipating something more like a literally social history of coffee; Cowan spends a lot more time on the economic and trade aspects of simply getting coffee from the Eastern growing fields to the West -- specifically, to Britain; more specifically, to England; even more specifically than that, to London. His discussion of the trade and sales aspects of the cycle of coffee growing, buying, and selling was interesting but, since economic tables tend to make me glaze and I have a hell of a time following arguments based around percentages, it didn't grab me.

Cowan's work on the social aspects of coffee in terms of drinking, use, coffeehouse culture, etc. was fascinating and I fully intend to mine his bibliography for additional reading. What I wanted -- I found after reading his first two chapters about the selling and buying of coffee in the middle and far east -- was a history of coffeehouse culture and the adoption of coffee into everyday life. While Cowan covers a little bit of that, I wanted more.

Swallowdale, Arthur Ransome.

I read Swallows and Amazons years ago as a child and, while I enjoyed it, I didn't have anywhere near the knock-on relationship with the books that Anna and her siblings seem to have had. I vaguely remember trying to read Swallowdale -- or perhaps it was Peter Duck? -- when I finished the first book and finding it just too boring to go on with. Nothing happened; the kids just wandered around, found a nice place, made a camp in it, found a better place, made a camp in that, and the book was done.

Whoopdee.

While this is still essentially what happens -- it isn't like the ghost of Arthur Ransome has been sneaking around adding in Daleks or anything -- I must have been in the right mood this time, because it struck me as being kind of sweet and rather restful. Nothing bad ever happens. Even when one of the children is injured, it's okay because all adults are helpful and kind and want nothing more than to drop whatever they're doing and be of assistance. The descriptions of the lake the kids camp around and the surrounding countryside are beautiful; probably the book is worth reading for those alone.

Winter Holiday, Arthur Ransome. (This isn't the edition I read, but I couldn't find that one and I love the "With Many Illustrations" caption on this one.)

Yeah, okay, I got on a roll. (But I bogged with the next one -- Pigeon Post was just too damned hot.) Holiday, though, was nice and cold -- all about Arctic exploration. Two new children are added to the original Swallows and Amazons group -- I'm not quite sure why he bothered with two since the sister of the brother-and-sister pair gets little to do and almost nothing to say. I don't think it's that Ransome didn't know how to write authoritative female characters -- check out Nancy of the Amazons and the mothers of both sets of children -- but Dora just seems...kind of pale. Perhaps it's the name? Is there ever a good, muscular character named Dora?

Body, Mind, and Spirit, Elwood Worcester.

I don't have a cover image for this one -- just you try searching Google Images for 'body, mind, and spirit' -- even adding an author name doesn't help! In any case, the book is quite elderly since it was originally published in the early '30s and I can't imagine it had a huge readership then.

Worcester was one of two leaders of something called the "Emmanuel movement," based out of the Emmanuel Church here in Boston and as far as I can tell, it was the one you walk past the Fenway going between the Simmons College residence campus and academic campus. (I'm not 100% on that one, so don't quote me.) In any case, I'm researching this movement for a blog post I want to write for work because we have 5 gigantic -- at least 4 inches thick -- scrapbooks of newspaper clippings all about Worcester, his helpers, and the movement. Worcester himself was a clergyman and the movement combined elements of faith healing, spiritualism, and all sorts of odds and ends to make up a kind of "self healing through willpower" idea.

It was wildly popular in the very early years of the 20th century -- between about 1905 and 1912 or so -- and then had a brief resurgence in the World War I era. Worcester himself put a lot of time and work into the movement since it was all based on his concept of how the world could be made a better place. Body is one of at least two books that he authored about the principles of the movement and, brother, it's a hoot. It's a little painful to read at times because it seems pretty clear, to me at least, that Worcester wanted to help people and thought he was. From our 2011 point of view, though, he must have done incalculable damage to quite a few people -- but probably helped some others. He wasn't a trained physician or psychologist but clearly thought that his lay experience as a preacher and parish leader made up for the difference. Not so much, really, but a fascinating read.

And last but not least...

Livia, Empress of Rome, Matthew Dennison.

This is an attempt at a biography of Livia, wife of Caesar Augustus, first (technical) empress of Rome. Dennison's aim here is to debunk the mythbuilding that surrounds Livia since the history-writing of the late Roman period (which villified her) and the exceptionally popular television series I, Claudius of the late 1970s which made her into a complete wicked witch figure.

Livia is a totally enjoyable read and I commend Dennison 100% for making early Roman history -- which can be awkward and unreadable and loaded with so many classical allusions and tags that it's just impossible to get through for the modern reader -- a pleasure to get through.

As to his aim of debunking the myth of Livia as villain -- eh. The problem with doing that is that there is so little evidence one way or the other. In case you never watched I, Claudius: for one thing, shame on you! Why would you deny yourself this fantastic pleasure? Go rent it immediately. For a second thing, Livia is the arch-villainess of the entire piece. And in a 13-some-odd hour series which also features Patrick Stewart as Sejanus and John Hurt as Caligula, that is no mean achievement.

Sian Phillips as Livia (with Brian Blessed as
Augustus in background.)

Livia is Augustus' third wife (he is her second marriage) and, as Robert Graves writes her, she kills her way to the top. Not through Augustus' other wives, by any means, but she poisons pretty much anyone who stands in the way of her eminence gris control of the Roman throne. If you don't want to eat any figs after you watch the show, don't blame me.

Dennison takes issue with this portrayal of Livia -- while giving Sian Phillips a grudging amount of credit for her eyewateringly good performance -- as based on partial and biased Roman historical sources, some of which were written years after Livia's death and, potentially, for political reasons that required her to be toppled from a prime position in the early history of Rome. Unfortunately for Dennison, it isn't like he has access to some great hitherto undiscovered trove of Roman primary sources either. He's stuck with even less material -- potentially -- than the Roman authors he says smeared Livia's reputation. And in his eagerness to clear Livia of charges of poisoning -- which I would imagine would be the cold case of the millennium anyway; unlikely even to be taken on by the Waking the Dead crew -- he does occasionally swing a little too far in the other direction.

Yes, okay, she probably didn't poison every single person Graves thought she did in order to put together a compelling and dramatic story but she also survived for a record long time in a society that was pretty much made up of backstabbing and treacherous political maneuvering. And she died of old age.That's a hell of a tight-rope to walk and keep your hands snowy white at the same time.

So, yes, read Dennison's book -- it's enjoyable and you'll learn things. But then watch I, Claudius. It is also enjoyable and you will learn different things.

Friday Fun Times

2011-05-27T00:00:00.001-04:00

Nothing Whovian this week, either. Youtube still seems like a pretty big Season 6 minefield, and yesterday Anna was laid up with a bad migraine, and I was curled up on the couch reading a biography of Livia.

But listening to Derek Trucks play guitar and Susan Tedeschi sing is almost as good as watching Matt Smith. Almost.

Rainy Thursday [Photo Post]

2011-05-26T00:00:00.004-04:00

It's rainy in Michigan, but earlier in the week, during a quintessential bright, clear summer day (we spent part of it in the hammock), Hanna snapped these gorgeous sun-drenched photographs.

lemonjello's (Holland, Mich.),
the coffee shop where my sister worked in college

I'm not frowning, just squinting in the sun. Also, I look like my mom!

Brewery with bicycles (we bought some to take home) (beer, not bicycles)

Detailing from the facade of the building that once housed my bank

Marbles in the sun

Marbles in jars

Hand puppet

Loom in the window

Wednesday in the Woods [Photo Post]

2011-05-25T00:00:00.002-04:00

As promised, photos from the Saugatuck Dunes. Photos by Hanna; selection and commentary by Anna.

On Sunday morning we went hiking with my (Anna's) parents

One of the major things I miss in the city is lack of access to the woods

Woodland violets

I also miss Michigan sand dunes

And the lake (I am hot & sweaty in this picture)

Root washed up on the shoreline

I wish there was a way for us to live & work in Boston
and still spend time here every weekend...

Tuesday on Twelfth Street [Photo Post]

2011-05-24T00:00:00.034-04:00

Welcome to part two of vacation photo posts, brought to you by Anna (text and composition) and Hanna (photographs). Cross-posted at the feminist librarian.

Toby takes a cat nap on the windowseat

Hanna's personal favorite: sunlight through the
French doors

Dinner preparations

Basil tomato pasta = yum!

The (uncharacteristically tidy!) dining room table

Up to the second floor (bedtime!)

Stay tuned for tomorrow's photos from our hike at the Saugatuck Dunes State Park.

Monday in Michigan [Photo Post]

2011-05-23T00:00:00.002-04:00

Hey all; Anna here. Hanna and I are in West Michigan (Holland, to be precise) this week, visiting with my parents and various other childhood acquaintances. I haven't been back here since October 2009. Hanna hasn't been here ever. I'm showing her the stuff I remember, discovering with her the new stuff that's happened since I've been away, and we're enjoying not having to go to work for the week. We're watching Season Two of Life on Mars and catching up on the leisure reading.

As I write this, Hanna is sitting next to me at the dining room table reading a history of coffeehouse culture in Europe, 1600-1720. I've been learning all the ways in which the responsible coffee user was supposed to ingest his/her drug of choice at the time (an hour before and after ingesting food, at as hot a temperature as could be tolerated) and all of the wondrous effects it was supposed to bestow.

Anyway. Here are some pictures from our Saturday walkabout. On Tuesday I'll be bringing you photographs of domestic life at the Cook household and on Wednesday photographs from the Saugatuck Dunes State Park, where we went hiking on Sunday.

Later in the week, there may be more photos ... or there might be a Friday Fun video. We'll see what the vacation brings!

All the photos were taken by Hanna.

On Saturday morning we went to the local farmer's market

It was nice, after two days in the car, to be out walking.

Miquel Fuentes, age 11, on his cello.
The turtle in the cello case is named PeeWee.

This was an addition to main street since my last visit.

We purposefully missed Tulip Time but the flowers are still blooming.

Sailboat on Lake Macatawa (latter-day Swallows & Amazons)

Stay tuned for Part Two (Hanna's lovely photographs of the interior of my parents' home) tomorrow.

Friday Fun Times

2011-05-20T00:00:00.001-04:00

I first heard this on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, so I went for a live cut rather than the "official" music video.

Something Whovian

2011-05-18T00:00:00.001-04:00

"Doctor Hoo," by Mallory Dyer.

Because I said there would be something Whovian on Wednesday.

This is not what I had in mind, but I love it and I think you should love it, too.

Photo Monday

2011-05-16T00:00:00.001-04:00

Preparations for travelling this week, folks. Check back in on Wednesday for some Whovian fun times and, in the meantime, enjoy some photos.

The Charles in sunshine. God, this seems like a long time ago.

Yes, our kitty does enjoy reading in her spare time. She just doesn't like it
when we read in our spare time.

Still life with tea and spider plant.

Still life with...er...beer and the History Boys.

This is the kitty hiding.

Candles. And Mitchell, George, and Annie.

Further candle.

Friday Fun Times

2011-05-13T18:38:00.000-04:00

So I don't have anything Whovian for this Friday. I'm dodging Season 6 spoilers like it's going out of style and, honestly, YouTube just seems like a dangerous place these days.

Instead, enjoy one of my all-time favorite Melissa Etheridge songs. And I love the way she flirts with the crowd...

Do You Have Your Towel?

2011-05-11T08:49:00.000-04:00

Reminded, albeit too late to do anything really cool, by @StephenFry that today is the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams, here is something to help you adequately commemorate the man: the original BBC radio broadcast in .mp3 form.

Don't say I never gave you anything. ;)

Kitchen Cupboard Recipes: Lentil & Matzo Ball Soup

2011-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

Photograph by Anna, May 2011

Last week, when Hanna was recovering from a nasty spring cold and Anna was in the final throes of her thesis presentation preparations, we were looking for bland comfort food that we could make without going to the grocery store. (The "not going to the store" bit was vital). What we came up with was a surprisingly tasty variation of lentil soup spruced up with matzo balls. You could probably make your own, but we just put ours together from a mix picked up at the local kosher grocery.

Beyond Basic Lentil Soup:

1 cup dried lentils

3 cups of vegetable broth (can substitute water + vegetarian bouillon)

1 can diced tomatoes

1 bay leaf

Salt & pepper to taste

You can obviously use this as a base to improvise upon. Like garlic? Onion? Fancy curry spice and some raisins? Have at it!

1. Heat broth in soup pan and add lentils and bay leaf. Cook until soft (usually 20-30 minutes). You can work on the matzo balls while the lentils cook.

2. While lentils are cooking, prepare matzo ball dough.

3. Set water to boil for matzo balls. This should be in a pan deep enough to boil the matzo balls and it should have a cover, preferably with some sort of vent for steam.

4. Add tomatoes and salt and pepper to the lentil mixture. Leave to simmer, stirring occasionally to make sure the lentils still have enough liquid.

5. When the water for the matzo balls boils, wet your hands and roll the matzo dough into walnut-sized balls. Drop them into the boiling water. They will sink to the bottom and then fairly quickly rise to the top in the boiling water. Turn the heat down to a gentle boil and leave for half an hour to cook.

6. Drain the matzo balls. Dish up the soup and spoon desired number of matzo balls into each bowl (I recommend more rather than less).

7. Top with cheese as desired (yum!). Serve hot.

This also makes excellent leftovers, reheating in the microwave beautifully in about 2 minutes. We recommend storing the cooked matzo balls separately from the soup, so that they don't just turn to mush.

Happy Arbogast Day!

2011-05-09T12:17:00.003-04:00

A day with a two-fer, huh? Wow. Must be y'alls lucky week! ;)

Anyway, how could I miss out on Arbogast Day (as started by the good folks at Kindertrauma and condoned by the equally good folk at Arbogast on Film) and the opportunity to talk about the eternal question of all fandoms: who would you save?

And so at some point last year I wrote a pretty uninspired post for this meme about Newt from ALIENS. And that's fine and I still adore Newt and I would still save her given the opportunity.

But over the past few months I've been delving deeper into my adoration for '50s sci-fi and I've rewatched Them! a frighteningly large number of times and you know what? It's Police Sergeant Ben Peterson's turn.

Them! is one of your seminal "effects of radiation making things huge and nasty" films. Released in 1954, its villains are giant irradiated ants who have become bored in their desert home and are wandering further and further abroad in search of food -- food that, increasingly, comes in human shape.

You don't actually see the ants for quite some time: the opening of the film is pure atmosphere as two New Mexico policemen, Peterson (James Whitmore) and his sidekick, Blackburn (Chris Drake), investigate a string of strange events, starting with the destruction of a family trailer and the disappearance of the family. The trailer is torn apart and, weirdly, sugar is strewn on the floor.

Peterson is the first to find a survivor of the ants: a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering in the desert. He picks her up, carries her carefully back to the police car, and is sure to look after until the medics take her away. When a strange sound echoes across the desert, neither Peterson, nor anyone else, notice that the girl reacts -- but silently.

As the weather begins worsen -- turning into a sandstorm -- Peterson and Blackburn turn to the local gas station -- only to find it, too, destroyed. The owner's nowhere to be found; his shotgun is torn in half. Sugar is, again, on the floor. Peterson goes for help; Blackburn will not be there when he gets back.

The opening of Them! is really slow in comparison to things like Space Children (which comes to mind because the Descher is in both films) or The Monster That Challenged The World or even something like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms or It Came from Beneath the Sea! -- Them!'s opening gives the audience time to settle in, feel comfortable, and then get disturbed -- and then feel comfortable -- and then get disturbed all over again. Perfect horror timing, really. Plus the filming is beautiful: lovely clean black-and-white with no camera tricks to distract from the essential fascination of the landscape itself -- and whatever is lurking in it.

But the point of this post is Sergeant Peterson. As I said before, he's the first to find a survivor and his care of the little girl and his evident sympathy for her situation and the deaths of her family make him stand out. The other policemen are interested in the crime -- not the little girl who survived it. Watch his face as he fits together the broken pieces of her doll and realises this poor kid is on her own. Peterson is interested in the people -- something that he evidences throughout the movie and eventually gets him killed.

As the story progresses and the eventual call is made for "expert scientific assistance," Dr. Harold Medford (Ed Gwynn) and Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) arrive. By now we also have Robert Graham (James Arness) as our local scientific expert overwhelmed by what's happening around him. Graham and P. Medford are clearly going to be our couple for the film and, since no-one tries to exclude Peterson, he tags along, learning as best he can and contributing as best he can. By now, the Army in full regalia is involved and Peterson is outgunned and (could have been) outclassed. But he's quiet, assertive, and calm -- in a room full of dramatic duelling egos, he's a valuable team member. He has a solid sense of humor -- as in his interactions with H. Medford during a helicopter search for the ants-nest. He knows these people are probably smarter than he is -- but there are also things that he does well -- like diving into said ants-nest with a flamethrower -- which he can do that they can't. He's willing for there to be give-and-take and to be a team-member without being a glory-hunter.

Some ants make an escape from the doomed New Mexico nest -- one queen is caught with her new brood on board ship. As the ship goes down, so do the ants: problem solved. But others are uncaught as yet -- until Peterson and the team start getting funny news stories out of Los Angeles. (The storm drains must have been a powerful pull for film crews even then!)

The team goes down to investigate and finds that a local man and his two sons have disappeared -- while flying a toy plane near a drainmouth. And an inmate in the hospital drunk ward across the way has seen strange things moving in and out of the drains -- huge ants, he says. But who's going to believe a homeless drunk? Peterson and Graham will, since they know he's right. Peterson and Graham have both honed their listening skills by this point in the story!

And here's where you start to feel that the storywriters either didn't know what to do with Peterson or thought they could give him a blaze of glory ending that the character really doesn't quite warrant. Graham and P. Medford are, as I said, clearly going to be the couple; H. Medford is the aging scientist who gets the glory of the new discovery in his old age; the Army dudes are....well, the Army dudes. They get to shoot things. What does Peterson get?

As far as we've seen in the story -- there's nothing he wants. There's no girl for him to get; no guy for him to get, certainly! He's happy with his job (we assume.) We don't see a home or a family or get any sense that there's someone worried about whether or not he comes back. He seems to leave New Mexico readily enough when the story moves away from its original setting. While the other characters either have roots that come with them -- the Medfords -- or are busily occupied in the creation of new roots -- Medford/Graham -- Peterson has neither and thus has no future at the end of this movie.

It becomes evident that the storm sewers need to be searched for the missing man and his kids. Peterson volunteers to go in as one of the on-foot searchers and, of course, tracks down the kids in the middle of a huge ants-nest: ants everywhere. As he struggles to get the kids up into a passage where they can climb down to the waiting soldiers, an ant comes up behind him and catches him. The boy safely climbs up into the passage but can do nothing to help Peterson. Despite the best efforts of Graham and the soldiers as they rush into the passage a few seconds too late, Peterson dies.

In the end, a few minutes later, the soldiers pour fire down onto the two queen ants in the nest and destroy them as H. Medford intones the semi-famous closing line of the film: "When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What will he eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict."

Peterson's death is pointless. It would have been just as easy to have Graham and the soldiers rescue him as not. As it is, it seems like his only point is to save the kids and then die -- as quickly as possible, please, we have a denouement to get to! I think he deserves better. Certainly better than a not-all-that-quick death by ant in an LA storm sewer. He's been a solid team player all along; a valuable member of the Anti-Ant Group; a helpful soother of distressed children; and an intelligent asker of questions. Couldn't we have done better for him than this?

In a way, Peterson is too nice for his own good: he hasn't eyed women (Graham) or been crotchety (H. Medford) or given orders to up the firepower (military). He's been almost self-effacingly quiet -- in a lot of scenes, it's possible to not notice he's there until he asks a question -- and reasonably pleasant. He's established early on as a rescuer and a salvager, a noticer of small things -- by his death, it would seem that the story is arguing these things aren't important or, worse, these things are dangerous. This seems unfortunate. A world left to the Medfords, the Grahams, and the military would be very full of shouting. Perhaps there would be no giant ants, but there would be no-one noticing lost children either.

Perhaps the Doctor and Sergeant Peterson would have gotten along well; neither of them felt able to pass by a distressed child.

The Feverish Critic

2011-05-09T11:21:00.003-04:00

In that these are all the movies I watched whilst I was sick! Or snoozed through. Although I have removed from the list anything I actually slept through more than 55% of.

Partly Cloudy with Chance of Meatballs. If you enjoy this sort of thing, you may enjoy this.

It made me dizzy.

And the monkey was annoying.

The Land Before Time. Anna and I watched this before she went to work one day. I have a vague memory that this was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid but I find I had no real recollection of it at all. But, damn, is that T Rex persistent! It must be second cousin to the ones in Jackson's King Kong remake -- goal-oriented behavior in a very serious way.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The new one. It was...good? I guess? I think I would have had a lot more fun with it if I watched it with my old roommate.

I don't find Nicolas Cage abhorrent and the kid was ok and Alfred Molina was delightful and there just wasn't enough Alice Krige. I mean, if you're going to cast Alice Krige as the maleficent sorceress -- then, by God, I want tons of evil witchy! Opening and closing scenes only = insufficient! I mean, it was a Disney movie. What are you going to say, really? Oh, I know what to say: was the little blonde goody-two-shoes "heroine" a total waste of time or was it just me? I mean, she was actually quite annoying, wasn't she? She seemed really...I hate to say this, but really stereotypically "dumb blonde." Cute and all but...wow. Or is this the decongestant talking and I'm being unkind?

Under the Mountain. I was a little more awake by now and less medicated and this is actually quite good. It's a rather slow, pretty quiet little Australian flick about a pair of twins -- a boy and a girl -- who have to reconcile their differences -- largely over their relationship as well as reaction to a death in the family -- in order to use a (good) alien weapon to destroy (bad) aliens under volcanoes.

Ok, that's the two-cent version and there isn't a whole lot of depth to this movie, to be fair. But there is some beautiful photography of New Zealand and some very nice quiet scares. Weta Workshop did good effects and makeup; octopoidy, slimy, kinda evil -- nice, middle-of-the-road villain. Oh, and someone scouted a great haunted house location on a lake -- full points for that. Sam Neill is fun to watch as always as the helpful alien who's been hanging around for a few hundred years trying to figure out a way to use his weapons against the nasty invading aliens. Real life kicks in every now and then -- check out the family conference after the next-door aliens have melted the front door to get at sister Rachel -- but not so much to derail the story. And the end is very satisfying.

In the Mouth of Madness. This, I really should have seen years ago. And I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be horrified by the general shenanigans and goings-on or by Jurgen Prochnow's hair. What the hell was up with that?

In a more serious vein: John Carpenter. Early 1990s. Cthulhu mythos. Sam Neill. About books. Hell yes.

And it is actually quite good. I'd almost given up on ever watching it after reading some critical reviews that just panned it from one end to the other. I remember when this originally came out and, if my memory serves, a couple of issues of Starlog of which I was a dedicated reader at the time were largely devoted to pictures of Sam Neill running down a slimy hallway.

There isn't, actually, a lot of slimy-hallway-running when you get right down to it, but there are some really interesting conversations about reality and fiction and how and when and where the two might intersect or become each other.

There are also a fair number of monsters and some seriously creepy kids with a red ball. Also a lot of nods to Lovecraft and King (more or less in that order) with the main plotline -- involving John Trent (Neill) as an insurance claims investigator being employed by a publishing house to check out the "disappearance" of their bestselling horror author, Sutter Cane -- taking most of its inspiration from "Call of Cthulhu" and a little bit from It. Cane's editor, Linda Stiles, is practically a walking dissertation on the nebulousness of the horror in Cane's work as she tries to convince Trent to take the case seriously and, as time goes on, to take what Cane writes seriously, too. In order to investigate the author, Neill first has to figure out where he might have gone -- since he turns in all his manuscripts by mail or through his agent and his agent is...unavailable for comment on the question, this involves some serious headscratching.

Sidenote here: it is really satisfying that Carpenter thought to answer the perennial question of all horror films here which is when the heavy brown matter begins to strike the rotating blades, the inevitable question I have is: hasn't anyone in this film/book ever seen a single horror movie in the entirety of their lives? Not even a single late-night viewing of Nightmare on Elm Street? And the answer in this case is: no. Trent is asked this point-blank in reference to Cane's work and he answers quite simply that no, he doesn't like horror or supernatural stuff because he doesn't find it believable. Great! Fine! Awesome. At least there is an answer.

Additional sidenote: Stiles was great. She's half a believer when she takes off with Trent on their doomed road trip and her willingness to deal with what's in front of her as opposed to what she "knows" must be true is heartwarming. It doesn't make her sliding slithering fall any less inevitable, of course, but at least she knows what the hell is really going on.

Once Cane's location is discovered -- after the creep starts to set in -- Trent and Stiles set off to locate an apparently fictitious small town in New Hampshire called Hobb's End. Weird shit happens on the way and weirder shit happens once they hit town. Are Cane's books deforming the town or has the town deformed Cane? Perhaps reality is just straight-up deformed and we've been fighting it all along and now gravity, so to speak, is reasserting itself.

Trent fights the good fight but, as is inevitable with all Lovecraft mythos heroes, loses. Dramatically.

Not to give away the game, but I loved the end. Shades of Danny Boyle all over the place.

Rage Dump

2011-05-07T09:21:00.002-04:00

enough yogic herbal hyper-empathy. he slaughtered us. orphaned little kids. who are we, really, to deny him his martyr's heaven? a win win.
We got the last true remaining monster of the 20th century - a gruesome slice of humanity - and bam! It's red vs blue again
To all news reports about Osama unarmed, not resisting, etc. I don't care if he was naked & tied to a chair, shoot the frakker. Thx Seals!

In case you're wondering, the preceeding are three tweets from folks I follow -- big shocker here -- on Twitter for whom I used to have considerably more respect.

I have deleted their names and any retweet information because I hope that one day at some point in the future, I will be able to forgive them for this. Maybe even forget that they did it.

I really didn't think that anything could lower my opinion of the mentality of the American public when acting as a group any lower than it already is but just like a good horror movie, as soon as you think you've killed the boogey-man -- bam! Back in your face.

And this has been an absolutely atrocious week for me -- I'll admit it. I either have the flu or the head cold from hell; I've missed all my hours at one job and all my hours but one day at the other. I have accomplished nothing except the filling of many Trader Joe's paper bags with used tissues, the consumption of a lot of tea or TJ's Yuzu citrus stuff, and a lot of cat-cuddling. I'm tired and achey and depressed and the good weather outside is really just making me want to close all the blinds and hide on the couch.

And there are street parties because a man was executed. I don't care what the mother-fucker did: in the end, we executed him. And what led up to it is a series of unpleasant activities culminating in the violation of another nation's sovereignty that I don't really want to think about right now because the stupidity and the shortsightedness and the viciousness and the lack of either foresight or historical hindsight make me dizzy with anger. I don't believe that can ever have been justified or right or even a reasoned act. This is sheer revenge-laden viciousness and the reaction is nauseating.

I'm not being very yogic or Buddhist about this right now. I did, in my fever-laden snooze this week, sometimes think I could write a post in that spirit.

But mostly I want to grab people who write things like these heaven-forsaken tweets above by the scruff of the neck and shake them until their fucking teeth rattle. This is not how you behave, people. This is behavior that rivals Fred Phelps for sheer disgust and, believe me, it is going to take many years of dedicated metta meditation before I could put Mr. Phelps in the appropriate category.

And that attitude on my part isn't helping.

So I'm going to go and brush my cat and help my girlfriend rearrange her books and drink some green tea and sweep my living room and try to get through my day as calmly and empathetically as I can.

Even if it means feeling compassion for people I would really rather see going down for the third time in the middle of the Charles.

Because I wouldn't. I don't want them to die; I didn't want him to die. I would like them to wake up magically tomorrow morning and think, "Oh, my God. What have I been doing? Did I go crazy? Well, enough of that -- lets go volunteer at an animal shelter." Or words to that effect. It would have been nice if the same thing had happened to bin Laden. It didn't and now it never can.

P.S. If you want more reasoned, thoughtful reactions to this, I suggest you check out thoughts on the death of a man or Ramblings on the death of Osama bin Laden.

Photo Thursday

2011-05-05T09:49:00.001-04:00

So for some reason, this seems to have been the week from hell for a lot of folks. Here in our household, Hanna has the flu, which is why I've volunteered to break radio silence with a photo post so you don't think she's been, you know, abducted by Mulder's alien friends. Or something.

Yeah.

Anyway. Here are some pictures by Hanna from our walk last weekend along the Charles River Esplanade. May 1st, through some strange coincidence, happened to be one of the first truly gorgeous spring/summer days here in Boston -- and we took photos to prove it!

Even the sailboats were enjoying the weather

Joggers and walkers were out in spades; and leaves
are finally starting to fill out along bare branches.

About halfway along the walk, we found that someone
had been busy with chalk writing encouragements on the pavement.

Encouragements like this -- charming in their artlessness.
(And to be honest, moving as well -- that someone took the time.)

This was my favorite. The text reads:
"<-- DUCK. Don't be afraid to fail (even at drawing)"

This was Hanna's favorite. The text reads:
"Just keep swimming!" (and a picture of a fish)

All of which reminded me of T.J Thyne's little gem of a film, which really should be broadcast on a weekly (daily? hourly?) basis across all forms of media worldwide. Possibly then there wouldn't be so many people doing stupid things which make us sad. It's 16:24 and I swear it's worth it. Make time in your day. You'll thank us.

We hope to see you again next week for our regularly scheduled programming.

Friday Fun Times

2011-04-29T00:00:00.001-04:00

So this seems to have become a twice a week blog. This wasn't an intentional choice on my part: more something I drifted in to over the past month or so. Part of this has to do with mental health; part of this has to do with a decrease in free time due to an uptick in paid work; and part of this has to do with the fact that if I type for more than a fairly set amount of time a day, my left wrist starts attempting to leave me.

Anyway, I'm still having fun with this and isn't a planned obsolescence or anything like that, so I hope someone's still out there having fun with this, too!

Short Thought: "Squirrel!"

2011-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

I deeply resent being told things are going to make me cry. I don't know why, but I do. If you want me not to watch something/read something/listen to something, tell me it will make me cry. I don't resent people who do, but I don't enjoy doing it myself.

There are, of course, movies and TV shows and books that make me...ahem...require the services of the Kleenex Corporation, shall we say. But I don't particularly enjoy being warned ahead of time that something will, of course and inevitably make me go all soggy.

So I avoided Pixar's latest production, Up, like the plague because that was what everyone I knew who watched it told me: "Oh, you'll cry your eyes out." "I cried so hard..." And...why would this make me want to watch a movie again? I want to cry, I'll watch The Dresser or the second part of End of Time again. Plus...something about the whole thing just looked so -- cheesy cute. I'm not a fan of heartwarming. I prefer my heartwarming accidental rather than intentional. I find the end of Terminator 2, for example, quite pleasing. You don't call me weird; I won't call you weird.

Still, this evening I was tired and feeling unwell and my parents had just watched it and raved about how good it was. Not how cute or how sobby it made them feel -- which would have made me worry about their alcohol consumption for the weekend -- but that it was a good movie. That, I will go for.

So I watched it. And it is a good movie: Pixar is a continual pleasant surprise in the quality and ability of their storytelling. The first eleven minutes and some-odd seconds of the film are...brilliant. A grand illustration -- literally -- of wordless (or nearly so) storytelling.

Once the story gets rolling in the present, of course, it's more or less your standard fairy tale: old guy is grumpy about his now deceased wife not getting to fulfill her life's wish; decides to fulfill it for her; attaches small fleet of balloons to house; takes off for South America. Er. Well, okay, maybe not quite standard, but you get the point. Pixar rings the changes quickly enough that you don't get bored and the lovely moments of character development and narration aren't subsumed under a heap of visibly fancy computer animation (although I can only imagine the skull sweat that went into making this thing.)

To cut a long story short, I was on board until the dogs started flying biplanes. Then -- I kind of opted out. Not that the ending of the story wasn't wholly satisfactory in an H. Rider Haggard/Indiana Jones-kind of way because it totally was, but there was only so far my headachey suspension of disbelief was going to stretch and that was it.

I loved Carl's storyline; was less interested in the boy, although he was sweet; and I kind of wish someone had done more with Doug. Something more like the valet-bot in Wall-E would have been nice. But, honestly, I adore Wall-E -- this really had no chance of unseating my favorite Pixar. (And it would have to work past Finding Nemo first, in any case.)

But Up is very sweet -- Carl's story is lovely -- and you don't have to go through two boxes of tissues to enjoy it either.

Friday Fun Times

2011-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00